University of the Air

Revolutionary medieval mystic Julian of Norwich penned what’s thought to be the first book in English written by a woman. She dared to suggest that God was both father and mother. Professor Sherry Reames explores the life, writings, and legacy of a courageous medieval anchoress and author.

By the end of nineteenth century, food in America could be ownright deadly. Sustances added to extend the shelf life of food often shortened the life of the person who ate it. But American corporations blocked even modest food safety egulations. Then, in 1883, chemist Harvey Washington Wiley was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically analyzing food and drink, resorting to sometimes shocking methods. Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum will tell us about the long and dangerous conflict behind making food safe.

We take a look at the US Constitution from the standpoint of America's founding father of the Supreme Court.

Are robots the future of dairying in Wisconsin? According to our guest, in some ways, cows prefer them to humans. We find out how technology is changing dairying in Wisconsin and elsewhere as we trace the evolution of the industry from buckets to robots.

Nandini Pandey, UW Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, shatters myths and misconceptions and shows how Ancient Rome embraced cultural diversity in surprising ways.

The story of the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 includes an improbable cast of characters embroiled in a controversy that would revolutionize not just American medicine but speed the American colonies down the path to revolution.

Pamela Oliver, Professor Emerita of Sociology, discusses racial patterns in incarceration.

WPR All Things Considered host Brady Carlson will take us on a tour of presidential grave sites, monuments, and memorials to tell the death stories of our greatest national leaders. Mixing biography and travelog, he’ll question whether William Henry Harrison really died of a cold, why Zachary Taylor’s remains were exhumed 140 years after his death, and reveal that what killed James A. Garfield wasn’t an assassin’s bullet. Along the say, we’ll find out how the ways we memorialize our presidents reveal a good deal about the men themselves.

Our guest explores the Declaration of Independence as a "masterstroke of propaganda," links Benjamin Franklin to WikiLeaks, and explains the use of stolen documents, fake news, and leaked letters on both sides of the Revolutionary War.

Today, the phrase “world music” can mean any number of musical genres with origins outside the United States. But how did the international sound come to permeate our musical culture? Ronald Radano, UW-Madison Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, shares samples of music showing international influences at the onset of the modern era, and explains how these influences were crucial in shaping the sound of past and present music.

Celebrated actors Randall Duk Kim and Anne Occhiogrosso present favorite scenes from the plays of the Bard of Avon.

In a recent study, Catherine Compton-Lilly followed a group of eight inner-city students from grade one through grade 11 to discover how time operates as a contextual factor in children’s lives as they progress through school and construct their identities as students and readers.

Behind the headlines of diplomatic breakthroughs, unofficial peace brokers do quiet and discreet work setting up negotiations between hostile nations. Our guest for University of the Air was a member of peace delegations that laid the groundwork for ending hostilities between India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, and North and South Vietnam. Joe Elder will tell us how he came to play the role of international peace broker, what the dangers were, and what it was like to meet in private with world leaders.

Professor Emeritus Stanley Temple explores Aldo Leopold's pioneering land ethic and shares some of Leopold's little-known radio shows from "College of the Air" from the 1930s. For a story about Leopold's radio talks and the search for his missing recordings, go to https://www.aldoleopold.org/post/still-searching-leopolds-voice/

Free association, transference—the Oedipus Complex. When he invented psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud also developed therapeutic techniques and concepts that, a hundred years later, are still part of our language. His analysis of dreams as wish fulfillment and his studies of repression led him to develop his theory of the unconscious and his concepts of the three-part structure of the human psyche—the id, the ego, and the super-ego. How well do his ideas about sex, compulsion, hate, death and guilt hold up today?