Q & A Panel Part 1 (Video)

Transcript

[Music]
So I want to welcome everyone
to the second annual Faculty
Author Spotlight.
Thank you all so much
for joining us today.
My name's Melissa
Chomintra, I'm the Scholarly Engagement
Librarian for the social sciences
and geospatial data at Howard
Tilton Memorial Library,
and I'm super excited
to moderate our first of three live chats
of this virtual series.
We will have another
tomorrow and Wednesday with
two other groups of faculty
authors that will share
their work with us.
And today, we've got a really great
bunch of faculty authors.
I'm sure you have been
enjoying our candid chat so far.
It's been really nice to sort of
just chat off the cuff with all of you
and sort of shake some of the
semester stress away.
So today we have with us
Ronna Burger, Professor of Philosophy,
who will be sharing their book
with us, Nature, Law
and the Sacred Essays In Honor,
actually, this is really special
because this was written
in honor of Ronna.
So that's something that I haven't
heard of before.
So I'm excited to hear more
about how this happens.
I know it's something
that's kind of specific to philosophy,
from what I understand.
We also have Dr.
Dennis Kehoe, Professor
of Classical Studies.
They'll be sharing with us
their book titled
Roman Law and Economics, Vol.
1: Institutions and Organization.
We also have Dr.
Kris Lane, Professor of History
with their work, Potosí,
if I'm saying that
correctly, The Silver City
That Changed the World.
Dr.
Nancy Maveety, Professor
of Political Science
with Glass and Gavel: The U.S.
Supreme Court and Alcohol,
which I'm also excited
to hear more about.
Dr. Adam McKeown, Professor of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies
with their work Fortifications
and Its Discontents
from Shakespeare to Milton: Trouble
in the Walled City. And
lastly, Dr. Esra Özcan,
Professor of Communication,
with their work Mainstreaming
the Headscarf: Islamic Politics and Women
in the Turkish Media.
So as I mentioned
that we have a few prearranged questions
to ask all the panelists,
and then we'll take
questions from attendees
if we've got time at the end.
So I'm going to jump right
in with the first question
and y'all can unmute yourselves
and answer as you'd like.
If you all want to answer the question,
that is absolutely fine.
If you don't want to share,
that is also OK.
We have three free range questions.
And the first is "How
and why did you choose your book topic?"
It's going to start.
Yeah, I don't want to call on anybody,
I don't want to be that kind of person.
Well, I know, right.
I'll start with this one,
because my book is
probably the most unconventional
in the sense that it's the most
popular oriented, probably
of our scholarly works,
because it's a history of both
alcohol and alcohol law,
specifically with respect
to the US Supreme Court
and the Constitution.
But, it's also a history of alcohol
in American political culture
and particularly cocktail culture.
So it's a fusion of
two of my interests, frankly.
I'm a scholar of the
U.S. Supreme Court
and of constitutional law
and of judicial decision making.
And I'm also interested
in social policy and law,
but I'm also a cocktail enthusiast
and an amateur historian of alcohol
in the United States.
And so this book was
an effort to put together two
interests of mine
and also to try to find somewhat
of a more popular frame
for talking about the history
of the Supreme Court
to make it more accessible
to a broader audience.
I guess I can also answer my
book sort of chose me
because I was., this is a big two volume
collection of essays
that involves scholars
from law, economics and ancient history
writing about Roman law and economics.
And I was originally
a contributor, and I know
the person who came up
with the idea fairly well,
but it soon became pretty obvious that
he would need a great deal of editorial
help, especially adapting
to people who were not scholars
of the ancient world
to talking about the ancient world.
So
that's how I got involved with mine.
I'll go ahead and answer
the question myself.
My book, Fortification
and Its Discontents
From Shakespeare to Milton,
it was the classic case
of unanswered questions
in the first book.
I did not set out in life
to be one of the only people
who does military cultures and literature
in the early modern world.
I kind of fell into that,
as I think a lot of young scholars do.
It was something I could do.
I mean, my dissertation was on esthetics.
You know, I deal
with pictures and poetry and
the illusion of images and writing.
And I was recalled
and deployed, and suddenly it seemed a
no brainer
to write about soldiers and poets.
In the process of doing that research,
I kept running into this statement
that was made in the scholars.
We get used to hearing these commonplaces
that need to be questioned.
Talking about well, of course,
the new age of warfare,
because the city walls
were now torn down
and armies, etc, etc cetera.
I love to do archival research
and I love to do "insitu" research.
I go out there and I find the old rocks.
I write better surrounded
by the old buildings.
So there I am in Quebec, I'm in the west
coast of Africa.
I'm looking at buildings
that when they were tearing down
walls, seemed to me
they're actually building new ones.
So I wanted to know what this was about.
And I sort of discovered that
changes to military cultures
and militarization
as a concept were
forcing radical and
widespread rebuilding of the
European environment
during the periods when the walls
were supposed to be coming down.
So I decided to focus on that.
I can chime in too,
I mean, my my book is about Turkey
and Turkish media.
I'm interested in the country.
I grew up there, born and grew up there.
And I was interested in understanding
the recent history
and politics since 2002; and especially
in 2002, the current president
came to power.
And since then, the country
took an authoritarian direction.
And the book is an effort to understand
how this happened, why this happened.
And what is the woman's role in it.
So it was
it was kind of an effort to understand
what happened, how did this happen?
Because this authoritarian turn
wasn't expected at the time.
Nobody could see what was coming.
So this was an effort to
try to understand
what changed after 2002.
Yeah, I can just say that
it's really great to be here,
and I appreciate
you guys putting this together.
It's really, really wonderful.
And I can see with our panel,
we have as a historian,
pretty great coverage of time periods
going from ancient to the present.
And I sort of fall in the middle
along with Adam.
I guess it's the middle.
I work on the 16th and 17th centuries.
And I sort of fell into this book project
after realizing that I just
was really ignorant
of the big scope of my topic.
And I was working on something
very pointed and
and definitive about a great fraud,
a gigantic fraud
that occurred in the middle
of the 17th century.
But I felt like I needed to have
a sense of the big scope of time.
And so the place I study,
Potosí, Bolivia,
was the most important silver
producing region of the world
for several hundred years,
and it altered global economics.
And as a consequence, many other things.
But starting with economics,
I wanted to globalize Latin America.
I guess that was my initial desire
to take a part of the world
that's often seen as peripheral
and secondary and often
victimized by other places
and try to put it at the center.
And so I did have an agenda, and
that was the kind of promote
this place and say
globalization is nothing new and in fact,
Latin America was front and center.
So that that pushed me along.
As Melissa was saying,
it's great to have your book
that you didn't have to do
all the work to write.
I've written books but this is very nice.
It's not just philosophy, Melissa, but
it's really, I think, probably
in German academic world, but festschrift
like a celebratory writing.
And it's usually a collection
of volumes for a mentor or a scholar.
Typically, you're 65 or 70
or 75 years old or
somewhere in that range.
And it's meant to show the influence
of that person's work
by students and other scholars.
So, as I think in one of those videos
I said, I've actually been
at Tulane for 40 years.
And my first Ph.D.
student right at the beginning
of (indeterminable)
put this thing together.
And there are other graduate students
from different cohorts
over the years
and friends and colleagues.
Richard Velkley you know, he's
got a really beautiful essay
on (indeterminable) in here.
And I think that the hard part was
when you do a volume
like this, a collection,
you're just doing it
by the people who studied
or were influenced,
but you don't know for sure
if it'll come together as a whole.
And I think we were all really excited
to see how much this did.
And the title sort of was
what pulled it together,
those themes,
the conflict or the tension
between nature and convention.
And then the way that
relation is connected
in turn with the sacred.
And that reflected my work,
especially in ancient
Greek philosophy and the Bible, an uneasy
relation of the two roots
of our whole Western tradition.
So it was exciting to get this.
And I think it's a way
beyond what I could have done myself.
I mean, the essays go all the way
to Kierkegaard and Descartes and
Boccaccio, and Dante,
way beyond my own narrow sphere.
But you see the residents
of your ideas and themes over history.
So it's really very satisfying.
I can imagine that
it just seems so special
and rewarding, you know,
and obviously very well deserved.
So thank you all for
sharing your answers
to our first question.
I'm going to ask the second,
which is "what was the most difficult
and or most rewarding part
of writing this or editing this
publication?" In terms
of like the process, yeah, your process.
Well, I guess
for me, the most rewarding thing
was to be able to help bring
a project that I didn't really start,
but I was part of at
the beginning
through many twists and turns
to a final and I think
from what other people have said,
a very successful conclusion.
And it was partly because
it involved scholars,
some of whom are quite famous from
law and economics in my humble field.
So, you know, it was a challenge to make
a work that actually had
some kind of unity to it in terms of
its intellectual reach.
So it was a lot of work.
So the most satisfying
thing, I guess, was
when I got the volumes on my front porch
in June showing that
it was actually done.
I'll go next, just say that
this may seem like a strange answer,
but the answer is it hasn't happened yet.
Those of you who are listening
or attending the panel
or not in the business,
you'd be surprised
to learn that we don't have
millions of people buying
these books, you know?
So a lot of times the
influence of what you do
doesn't manifest for a decade.
And when my first one came out,
it was not,
I don't think it was very well
received at all.
Renaissance Quarterly made fun of me.
Within 10 years, though, two books
just like it came out.
You know what I mean?
Because you're breaking new ground.
You're talking about somebody
no one's talked about before
and other scholars follow you.
And now I look back on it and say
that was satisfying.
Like right now, nobody
except me is talking
about fortifications and literature
in the 17th and 16th centuries; I'm it.
And at some point,
someone will ask the same questions.
And, you know,
they'll look at my book and say,
you know, he's got some good ideas,
but not great ideas.
I think I've got great ideas.
I'm going to build on those,
all of a sudden you see like, wow,
you're actually enlarging knowledge.
So I look forward to the satisfaction,
but I suspect it'll be 5 or
10 years from now.
Thanks for sharing that.
I think it's a good reminder
to all scholars and budding scholars,
you know, to pursue those passions
and that you might not see,
you know, these accolades
come through immediately.
And it's not always about
the short game, right,
but what you actually contribute overall.
So I think that's a great reminder.
Oh, let's see, I wanted to add something.
I've gone kicking and screaming
into each new technological development.
But it really is so interesting to me
because my experience
for so many decades,
what Adam just described,
but now with these sites
that I never thought
I would do, but academia.edu
and these videos, we do.
I mean, it's interesting.
Finding out people in
you know Turkey and all over
the world are reading your work.
You can find out where they are.
I don't know, it's interesting
to me, it's a very different world
and especially with our current
virtual distance learning and all that.
I think my work has
gotten more widespread
quickly than ever before
because of all these new developments
that I resisted.
Yeah, I could I could add to that.
Just last summer, my book came out
just before I was traveling
when it was still possible to travel.
I traveled to Bolivia
and I took a bag with,
you know, as much weight
as you could put in it, a disposable bag
with books, just copies
of this Potosi book,
because I was going to a conference in in
Potosí and I wanted to give copies
to the people in the archives
and everybody there,
even though most of them were like,
let us know when it comes out in Spanish.
This is nice, but we can't read it.
But I actually carried these books
across a swollen river
and, you know, had this experience of
I'm actually like in the colonial period,
hauling books to the periphery to
distribute them.
So I guess the most
rewarding thing for me
was that experience
of getting the books
to the place that the book's about.
And then if everything else is fine,
I don't care if the reviews
are positive or negative.
Well, I do care, but, you know.
Did you take pictures of yourself
with the swollen river?
I love this idea of like,
I've got to get these books
to the archive, man.
I have pictures of my very wet,
lower half holding a suitcase
on my shoulders.
Too bad it's too late
for the jacket photo.
I think that's extraordinary.
I'm not sure if everybody
gets that experience.
I mean, I don't recommend it.
Swollen river aside,
but being able to bring,
you know, this piece of work
to the actual place that it's about.
I think that's, you know,
potentially once in a lifetime.
I don't know, hopefully not.
But, you know, very rewarding.
I'm assuming, I have no idea.
Well, I was at a conference
one time and it rained.
So I guess that was mine.
It's pretty much the same thing.
Yeah, I mean.
I want to know, did you keep
a journal like, tonight the swollen river
stopped us in the passage,
but fortunately, my...
The great book delivery,
I'll write that story for The New Yorker.
Were you wearing a helmet at the time?
That's like Aguirre and the wrath of God.
It was closer to that.
No, but I will say the review process,
very much as Adam said,
it's a slow thing.
And so you kind of,
you're tempted to keep checking, to
say, has somebody published a review yet?
And finally, when they come out,
they usually, you know,
they're like they got it or
no they just didn't get it.
They didn't see what I was trying to do.
I had a review like that recently
where it was clear
that the author of the review just either
missed my point entirely
or was writing about a different book.
I couldn't tell.
And then another review came out
just a little bit later,
and it was just like,
oh, man, that's exactly
what I had in mind. I'm glad it worked.
Why is it that it didn't
work with this person?
You never know.
This is true, yeah.
Everyone has their
own version of your book.
You know, to speak about the
the front end of the production,
we're talking about the reception and
things like that
to think about, you know,
what are both the challenges
and the rewarding things
in the production of a book.
I would say in the case of this book,
I had a couple of,
you know, challenging
but ultimately rewarding experiences.
One is just the experience
that I'm sure Kris can identify with,
any historian can identify with,
and that is searching through an archive
and finding the gem,
the evidence that you needed
to make some connection.
In my instance,
it was between a particular Chief Justice
and a particular favorite cocktail,
since that's one of
the motifs of my book.
And so among the things
I did was wade into
judicial papers, which,
as many of you know,
who work with archives are often
not very well organized.
And so you're just sifting
through all kinds of things
and getting an impression of a life.
That was really fun for me,
I don't typically do that kind of work
because I'm a political scientist.
But it was immensely fun,
and I would love to do more of it.
And then I suppose
this is may seem
pretty prosaic and mundane,
but some of the most rewarding episodes
for me were securing
the permissions for images
that I wanted to use.
Man, I mean, you wouldn't believe
some of the hurdles one has to surmount.
And everybody,
I believe in copyright law, sure.
But, you know, there
are sometimes obstacles
that you don't know will be there,
both financial and otherwise.
And for some books,
images are really critical to capture,
you know, an epic
or to get a sense of a person.
And when I secured a particular image
that I wanted having to go
through a deceased artist's family, well,
I was like, yeah.
So that was kind of a that was kind of a
run of the mill production level reward.
But I think it made the book stronger.
Well, I wanted to ask
what the favorite cocktail was.
I have to ask.
I don't want to get
too deep in the weeds.
Well, this was Chief
Justice Harlan Fiske Stone,
who was known to be a great wine lover
and who served essentially
during World War Two.
He had a pretty short tenure of office.
But I knew that that was a period in
which rum was really, really popular
as a beverage, again, was really,
really popular in the United States,
partly because of the legacy
of prohibition when domestic production
had been shut down.
And so consumers in the United States
had turned to the Caribbean.
And so this had amped up
a real taste for rum.
But everything we knew about stone
was that, you know,
he disdained cocktails.
But I found a hand typed recipe
that he had saved
for a rum based cocktail.
And so it just validated for me
everything about his era
and things that we didn't
necessarily know about.
This former professor who was supposedly
a big wine and cheese fan, but also
partook of the things
that were popular in the time.
Very cool.
I'm going to send Nancy,
if you don't know, there's
a website of cocktails
named after famous scholars.
I'll send you the link later it's good.
But on the image issue
and getting permission,
the press kind of covered
up my image with the title.
This image
I had picked for another project
which I heard in the classic
lecture is Juro Europass.
It's such a fantastic time of the Greek
and biblical Hebrew and Greek.
So this the Temple of Solomon
with Greek columns and everything.
It was amazing for me to discover
the image was so great.
It really was about Athens and Jerusalem,
which is my world.
And then it was a struggle
to get permission to use it.
But it turned out it wasn't for my book,
it was somebody else.
You know, it was taken
over by my editor here.
This whole topic,
maybe it will spawn questions, but with
Ron's earlier comment about technology.
Copyright law isn't
what it used to be either.
So in the case of someone who owns
a photograph is still alive,
but certainly what Kris and I work with,
there's no one left alive.
But so sometimes
if an archive owns that image,
if it's actually a
high quality digital image
that someone else owns,
you're allowed to use theirs
without permission.
That's changed, that's a new thing.
And I don't even know
how I feel about that.
I mean, that's not what we're necessarily
talking about today,
but just sort of the way
the writing in the scholarly
writing has changed,
we can now use images
without permissions.
And I feel like some part of
the book is lost.
If I didn't get to say,
you know, I want to express my gratitude
to the National Archives in Dublin
as if I've been there,
they know me, you know what I mean?
But now I don't get to do that
because I can just take it
from someone else who has it.
You can still you can still give a shout
out to the National Archives of Dublin.
They'll always appreciate that, I'm sure.
Yeah, I advise my
graduate students
to plan on another year,
getting their permissions together.
It's almost an extra book,
even though things, as Adam says,
they've gotten a lot easier.
It just takes a lot
longer than you imagine.
Even with email and PDF and documents
that you can sign without sending them,
you know, through the regular mail,
it's still really tough.
I had this cover image in mind
from the very beginning,
because it encapsulates
the story of the book.
It's the mountain,
it's the Inca and the pillars of Hercules
that stand for the Hapsburg World empire.
And the silver in the middle
is actually visible
on the on the original image.
And there are llamas
and people on the mountain.
But this image belongs to an Irish baron.
I had to write to him personally,
and I didn't know
exactly how to address him
like your grace, your mercy.
Your most humble servant is requesting
this use of this image.
But he he said, just call me Sean.
And so Sean allowed me
to use this message and this image.
He sent me a
handwritten permission and said, no,
I'm just glad it's
going to be on the book, that's great.
But it's that reminder
that it is a collaborative project,
even though, you know, we take credit.
My name is on there as the author.
There are a lot of other people
that are involved in the production team.
And in this case,
I was even really
surprised when it arrived
because they put
kind of a silver lining into the book.
I never asked for anything,
but they kind of
did a really nice job
with the production.
And I was like, man,
this is this is the best
looking book I've ever produced.
I'm really amazed.
So when a press feels like
they want to push your stuff, they
can be kind of nice.
OK, let's move on to our
last question
and then we'll have
some time for folks to
ask questions or any of the attendees
can ask questions
or y'all can ask questions of each other.
And then for the attendees,
when you do want to ask a question,
I think you have the ability
to raise your hand
and then we can unmute you
if you want to vocalize your question,
or you can also use the Q&A.
So our last question, "did
anything you learn
while researching
the topic surprise you?"
Were there any big
surprises or things that
maybe you discovered
that you didn't expect
that you'd want to share?
Well, I had a big surprise.
One of the papers
and the thing I was editing
was written by two economists
and to make their discussion
of the ancient world
seem more historically accurate.
I wound up coauthoring an article
with him, a paper with him.
And so I thought it was kind of cool
that I work with two economists
whom I've never even met.
And we have a coauthored paper.
So that's being
interdisciplinarity for you.
I discovered Ireland.
Well, I have to say,
I'm inviting questions on this topic.
A lot of times probably
each of us has an area
that's closely related.
What we study that we have avoided,
like the minds of Moriya.
If you follow the topic
like this, this dark place
that I don't want to deal with it
because too much work,
I don't know about it.
For me, doing British studies,
I mean, doing a lot
with Elizabethan Jacobean in England
and you know,
and also the Revolutionary England,
I didn't deal with Ireland
because I grew up with Irish nationalism
as being such a dominating
that whole world.
And in this book, I couldn't
avoid it anymore.
I had to start dealing with Ireland.
And so I did.
And discovered that in the 21st century,
a lot of the baggage
of that sort of fictional
Irish nationalism
and that weird Celtic
racial identification is now
finally giving way
to something better and new
and sort of discovering that whole world
of scholarship
that I could get into in this thing
that I'd been avoiding dealing with,
I just dealt with.
And it was so much fun, exciting,
and I can't wait to do more.
I can share a surprising point
throughout my writing.
So in my book, I'm analyzing
the columns of human journalists
who support Erdogan,
I mean, the guy who
came to power in 2002 in Turkey.
So these are women who write in
newspapers that support him.
But these women also before
Erdogan came to power,
they were seen as people
who would kind of contribute
to the improvement
of democracy in the country.
So when I started working
on their columns,
I thought, OK, I mean, these journalists
probably they see politics
differently from me.
When I started writing,
I regularly observed
concentration of power
in the hands of Erdogan.
And I mean, I thought
I was seeing something like I was seeing
an increasing authoritarianism,
a concentration of power.
But I thought they saw
something different.
So they they didn't see what
I was observing.
Well, when I started
writing or when I started reading their
columns one by one, I realized that,
well, they observe the same things.
You know, they observe
more concentration of power.
They observe increasing authoritarianism.
They observe things are going wrong,
but they still support him.
And they will continue to support him
and they continue
to support him to this day.
So this was a very
surprising point for me.
So that was
something to think more about.
I had, I think, a surprise
in reading this book and receiving it.
I knew that all of the modern thinkers
would be new material for me
and very interesting, but new.
But Adam said before,
there's something close to your work
that you have avoided for years,
and it's a big deal.
For me, that was the thinker
Xenophon, writer Xenophon
who wrote Socratic dialogs,
but is much less studied than Plato.
And it's really shameful
that I've never really studied Xenophon.
So there's a chapter in
this book on Xenophon,
and he was so presently modern
in a really interesting way.
And it was just a fascinating study.
So I got excited about it
and I'm teaching it this semester.
So that was an influential surprise.
Well, I guess among the surprises
that I encountered in doing this book,
which I would describe as a fun book,
I mean, I did it for fun.
Was first of all, just how much
constitutional law throughout
the history of the court's
interpretation of the
Constitution and application
to policy questions, to legal questions.
How much of that has concerned
alcohol in some way
and how alcohol and its regulation
or questions about the
right to use it or using it in
certain circumstances or commerce
involving alcohol?
How much of every step
developmentally of U.S.
constitutional law
has some alcohol
related connection to it?
And I suspected this
at the outset, that's why
I wanted to write the book,
but the findings were even more,
well, jarring, I suppose.
That this really is
a motif that makes sense
for understanding U.S.
political culture
and constitutional culture.
Yeah, I think I could add that
every time you sit down
to start a project,
whether it's an article or a book,
not that we do books all the time.
They take a long time.
But it's a process of discovery.
I mean, you set out thinking
it's going to look kind of like this.
And I, I suspect it's
going to shape up like so.
And I have a pretty good
working hypothesis I'm
fairly confident in.
And then as you're working it through it
changes directions,
or at least in my experience,
it's a process of,
oh, OK , I didn't know about that
and now I need to fill this in
or I see a gaping hole,
you know, as Adam
and Ronna have already said,
I see something that I missed.
And I guess I have to go into that now,
I have to figure that out.
So in a strange way, writing
a book is more of a
a process of discovery for the scholar.
And then when you're done with it
at a certain level,
you're kind of like, OK, now
I'm on to something else.
I've I've spent five,
10 years working on that.
Now I think I've got it
figured out to my satisfaction,
maybe not to anyone else's.
And I'm going to do something else now.
But
that's satisfying, even if,
you know, our readerships are not huge.
That's sort of the nature of the beast.
And I really do
appreciate Tulane support.
I have to say, it's
been a really supportive place to
to be a scholar.
And, you know, all the way along with,
you know, financial support.
It's always a struggle.
I mean, everybody has to
piece things together,
but it's been a really good place
to do scholarship.
What you say is good advice for Ph.D.
students, too.
It's not going to
all be firmly fixed in the proposal.
You can remain open to
new discoveries, if you will.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm going to cheat.
I know that I said that
that was my last question for you all.
But Kris made me think to ask,
when you're chatting just now about,
you know, you're already
on to the next thing
or thinking about the next thing.
Would you all mind sharing
like what that next thing is for you?
Potentially, if you have
something in the works
or that maybe it's
just a little seedling up in this moment
if you wanted to share.
This is a really significant
question for me,
because I've been very slow
10, 15, 20 years on Plato.
Another 20 years on Aristotle.
And I've been teaching these courses
at Tulane on Bible and philosophy
and in the academic world,
as we all know,
you stay in your own lane.
But you develop scholarly skills
and background and training
and connections.
It's not so easy to move out of that.
So I myself in now a number of years,
probably another 10 years, moving toward
wanting to write on the Bible,
which I've been teaching happily.
But it's different
to write on something than to teach it.
So, yeah, that's a really
interesting experience.
I think some people are more
bold and innovative, but
just how academia can
keep you round, it's not so easy
to break out of these alleys and move
in new directions.
So teaching can help with that, too,
because most of us
teach more broadly
than our scholarly work, you know?
Anyway, that's what
I want to do next.
I have just completed another
project after the book,
it was a journal project,
and I had an article in it
about the debates
that took place in Turkey
in the last year.
And my next project,
I think, is to rest in it.
And, you know, like gather energy,
experience life.
In other dimensions of life
and then go back to writing back,
my next project is to
gather my energy and rest.
Well, I have a long term project
on land in many different aspects
in the Roman world.
But I also, you know,
I think a lot of us, we
get asked to write things, and so
they always seem to come out first.
And so right now,
I'm supposed to be finishing up
something on poverty in the ancient world
for a more general collection on poverty,
economic aspects of poverty.
And then
I have another essay that is sort of
related to the land project, but,
I was just at a conference
for the other one just before this.
And so it always seems like there's
a lot of things to do.
I'd like to return to something
that Ronna mentioned,
and that's the nexus with teaching.
One thing that was generated
by my work on this
book, was a special topics
course I did a few iterations of
and my colleagues
convinced me to entitle it
Booze, Drugs and The Courts.
So it would sound
more enticing, and I guess it was.
But what it asked me to think about
were some of the parallels
in both regulation and
rights debates over
the saga of alcohol in American law
and current debates over
both the legalization of cannabis
and also the saga of narcotic drugs
and other drug substances
in the United States.
And of course, this
recent election cycle,
we had some very
interesting state referenda
on these questions.
And, you know, in my course,
I tried to put it all
together into some sort of
organized theme.
But I learned a lot
and I learned that
there are lots of directions
that this work about controlled
substances and intoxicants
and the law could go.
And, of course, the obvious
debate to investigate
is the saga of marijuana
in the United States.
And, of course, the current seeming,
you know, move towards greater
and greater openness
with respect to both medical
and recreational
cannabis as its preferred to be termed.
So that represents a huge opportunity
and ability to coauthor and collaborate
with people who are
public opinion scholars
and things like that.
So I'm very excited
about lots of different directions.
And I continue to research
historic cocktails, of course,
and think about
what should be our totemic
cocktail for the Trump era.
For me right now,
it's a fun question
and a frustrating one in some ways
for British studies,
especially because of,
you know, finally
the imperial shadow is withdrawing.
It's wide open again.
It's very exciting.
It's an exciting time to be alive
in British studies. I mean, it really is.
As I said, Ireland is you know,
you can actually do Irish studies
without having to deal
with Irish 19th and 20th century
Irish nationalism.
You can you can look at things
like the Ulster Plantation.
And without having to look at it
as it is a 20th century problem,
sort of, you know,
as the early 17th century
problem, that that is
wound up in 20th century politics.
England itself is sort of looking
at its own existence
and questioning paradigms like,
you know, its isolation.
I mean, I've seen wonderful
scholarship coming out of England
saying like England wasn't isolated.
I mean, back then, and Dennis
can probably talk
to this more; oceans connected, land
separated, right.
Getting from ancient,
what is now China, to what is now
Europe was really,
really hard to do across land,
but water connected things.
I've seen British scholars
even questioning
what did people,
what did the Anglo-Saxon
people look like?
Like what did people look like
in England back in
the first century A.D.?
And the answer is
they didn't necessarily
have like red haired brains.
I mean,
we don't really know the connection
between Britain and Phoenician cultures,
wide open.
But the same reason is
wide open here, too.
So what I would love to do
is talk more about
the idea of England in its past
freed from the legacy of empire and,
you know, in some ways freed
from the legacy of 20th century
Marxist scholarship,
which merely recast the same paradigms
of imperial thinking, but in
sort of an adverse way.
It's wide open.
What I would really like to do is go
and look at this continent
and especially looking at our, you know,
looking at people like Red Cloud
and others as important American figures
and repositioning them in the dialog.
I just got out of
Army War College this year
and I asked the question
point blank to the folks,
which we could do, like
why are we looking at General Lee again,
why aren't we looking at Red Cloud?
You know, why are we talking about
the tactics of General Jackson?
Why aren't we talking about Red Cloud?
Now, I mean, those are questions
that are vaguely early modern
that I would love to see us do,
like reposition.
Really look at this continent
as a whole bunch of things
and a whole bunch of people
that also contributed to it
in ways that we haven't
even started to discuss.
Does anybody else want to add anything
before I open it up to questions?
It looks like we already have
a couple in the Q&A, so a reminder pop
your questions into the Q&A,
which is different from the chat
we are using the Zoom webinar platform,
so it's a little bit different.
You should see a Q&A button
at the bottom of your Zoom screen.
So pop those in there, and I'm happy
to read those out loud.
Our first question is for Dr. Burger,
Why do you think
the themes of nature, law
and the sacred run
through our whole tradition?
Oh, yeah, that's a big question.
Well, you know, it's often been said
that philosophy begins
with the question
of whether the things that we all accept
like convention,
whether any of it
is actually true by nature.
Like every society has its own ideas
of what's just and noble.
These are the conventions in Plato's
great image.
That's the cave
that every society lives in.
And philosophy is asking
whether any of those
conventions are by nature.
So that tension,
which is really I think is the
you know, the tool of philosophic inquiry
runs through us all great thinkers.
Then it's compounded or maybe complexed
by the biblical tradition
or revealed religion.
If there is a creator, God
is determined reality.
Is there any nature in nature?
And how does the sacred
fit into that dichotomy between
nature and convention?
And finally, the issue that I've really
kind of wrestled with and fought
with other scholars about
is whether the Bible and religion
can have this distinction
of nature and convention.
Can the Bible have an idea of nature,
the reality and the nature of things?
So, yeah, it's the big questions,
so it kind of surprised me
to see the concrete ways
in which it showed up
in all these other thinkers,
you know, from medieval to modern.
But when you think about it,
these are such fundamental questions
that I think last through human thought.
Mm hmm. Great.
All right, and next question is for
Dr. Ozcan.
The question is,
it's from Lisa Hoopers.
So she says, it's
so great to see you again, by the way.
She says she has a very good friend
doing his Ph.D.
work on an American variation
of what you have done.
It's such intellectually
and emotionally challenging work,
seeing the parallels
and knowing plenty of others are looking
at this modern American moment.
I'm wondering what techniques
you could pass on
to other researchers for separating
and protecting yourself
from your own research.
Thank you, Lisa.
I can't see you, but
thank you very much for the question,
which is a great question.
I mean, these are very similar topics.
I mean, when I worked on this book,
I kept thinking about women
supporting Trump.
So and also the last four years,
like a lot of things
prompted the reaction.
I mean, I saw this before.
And so very similar processes
are taking place
in two different countries.
And there are no techniques
that I can think of.
And I suspect there is none.
These are topics that make you nervous.
And I think they keep you nervous
even after you are done
with the book and everything.
You don't know where it will land in.
And so, yeah, I mean,
I wish I could say something.
I could promote something.
But I'm afraid these are
topics that we have to deal with.
And I wrote this book
and now I have to deal with
anything that it brings to me.
Right, positive and
negative.
And the next question
I see is also about Erdogan.
So even Erdogan before came to power,
he has been and his party
has been very critical of
the regime promoted by Ataturk.
So Atatürk's regime was based
on a model of a Westernization.
And so Erdogan came to power
by constantly
criticizing these different
aspects of this project.
So, I mean, it is
not so easy, because Ataturk's project
I mean, has been embraced by millions.
But there are also
social groups who fell outside of it.
So here
he basically played those dynamics.
But it is you know, he is on his regime.
Hasn't been very fond of the project
brought by Ataturk in the first place.
Thank you, it looks like
we've got one more question in that chat,
this might be our final question,
it is a very important question.
It is from Eric Weedig,
and it's for Dr. Maveety.
It is were many of the Supreme Court
Justices bourbon drinkers?
The answer Eric, is yes.
Bourbon drinkers?
Absolutely.
And bourbon, you know, is popular
throughout American history,
right from the beginning
of the domestic production of whiskey.
When it's produced in
Kentucky and gets its name
all the way up through the 20th century
and even now in the current
revival of cocktail culture, et cetera.
Probably one of the most, you know,
outstanding bourbon
drinkers of the Chief
Justices was probably Fred Vinson,
who was a very good friend
of Harry Truman.
That's kind of how we got nominated.
And Harry Truman was known
as a bourbon drinker, loved Bourbon.
Washington, nowadays, just so you won't
worry, is not as hard
drinking a town as it once was.
People are much more moderate.
I don't know.
Is that a good thing or not?
Who can say?
But the the stories you read about
of mid century, last century,
that sort of culture of alcohol
and politics
has been succeeded by very different,
very different behaviors.
Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg drink cocktails?
Yeah, she did,
and she had a favorite spirit
which was Campari, which is in Amaro.
And of course, Campari figures in
various cocktails,
including my favorite cocktail,
which is the Negroni.
Those are tasty.
I'll go have one right now.
Celebrate our successful panel here.
If you were in New Jersey,
I'd say be right there.
This was a lot of fun.
Yeah. And thank you so much.
We have one minute left.
I want to be respectful
of everybody's time.
So I do want to take a moment to
thank everybody who participated,
whether you are panelists or an attendee.
I do want to thank
Courtney Kearney and Amanda Morlas
and Alan Velasquez,
who are integral
to putting this together,
whether it was editing
or communicating
with you all or reaching out.
All of it took to make this go.
And, of course,
all of our faculty authors
who without y'all,
this obviously wouldn't be happening.
And this is extremely fun
and very lively.
So thank you for participating,
especially through
all of your Zoom fatigue,
which I know we're all experiencing.
And then a reminder,
we'll be doing this again tomorrow
with a whole new batch of folks.
So if you want to pop in tomorrow,
we welcome you all back to hang out
and do it all again.
I wanted to add one thing.
You know, all of us
and all the faculty
you go to your conventions in your field.
So if you're a famous person,
I know you're all around the world,
even in our own university,
we don't really know enough,
you know, about one another.
And it's just any
opportunity like this to,
you know,
branch out and hear
what other people are
working on is a pleasure.
Absolutely.
And that's one of our favorite things
about this as, you know,
getting everybody across
campus together,
because those opportunities
don't often exist.
So it's always really fun.
And there's a lot of commonalities
between the struggles that you all face,
you know, putting this stuff together.
So it's interesting
to hear the different experiences,
but also the connecting threads
throughout all of this.
So, again, thank you
so much for participating
and enjoy the rest of your days.
Hopefully it contains a Negroni or two.
Well, thank you all for using this.
This is really nice.
Thank you.
Thank you. Yes, thank you.
I've laughed a lot. It's been wonderful.
I learned a lot, too.
But it's just been it's been great.
Just so you know there is a long faculty
meeting to start.
Negronis after that.
Right.
Bye, everyone.
Well, thank you.
[Music]

In collections

Faculty Author Spotlight 2020 Series

Details

Title: Q & A Panel Part 1 (Video)
Part Name: Ep.20
Series Title: Faculty Author Spotlight 2020
Creator: Tulane University Libraries
Moderator(s): Chomintra, Melissa
Panelist(s): Burger, Ronna
Kehoe, Dennis P.
Lane, Kris
Maveety, Nancy
McKeown, Adam
Özcan, Esra
Editor: Velasquez, Alan
Date Issued: 2020-12-14
Description: Tulane Faculty Author Spotlight 2020 Series Live Zoom Q&A Panels Part 1. Featuring Ronna Burger, Dennis Kehoe, Kris Lane, Nancy Maveety, Adam McKeown, and Esra Özcan. Series organized by Melissa Chomintra, Courtney Kearney, and Amanda Morlas. Video produced by Digital Scholarship & Initiatives at Tulane University Libraries. Video edited by Alan Velasquez.
Extent: 57 min., 10 sec.
Form: videorecording
Type of Resource: moving image
Genre: Panel discussions
Publisher: Tulane University Digital Library
Language: eng
Identifier (Local): FacultyAuthorSpotlight_Q&A_pt1.mp4
Rights: In Copyright - http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Q & A Panel Part 1 (Video)

Description

In collections