Overdue Conversations is a podcast about the ways archives inform our discussions around history, literature, and politics. From digital publishing to reparative justice, climate change to public health, this series of overdue conversations takes archival documents out of the stacks and into the public forum to consider how collecting practices, selective reading, and erasure of past knowledge informs and distorts contemporary debates.
Hosts
Lina is the Curator of Literature at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library where she stewards collections from early printed books to archives of publisher’s houses. Her recent projects include a series of workshops on Toni Morrison’s editorial work at Random House and an exhibition on the long “Literary History of AI,” including 19th-21st century mechanical and algorithmic tools for generating and analyzing texts.
Thai is Lehman Curator for American History at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He studies radical social movements, New York City history and Environmental History in the United States. He is the author of two books, More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014 [2012]) and A Radical Lines: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004).
Lina and Thai have co-curated an upcoming exhibition, entitled “Social Climates,” that reexamines Columbia’s archives in the context of environmental change, drawing on new scholarship to connect cultural ideas, political change, and social structure to the earth’s unstable climatic and disease ecologies. “Social Climates” draws on collections from ancient coinage and papyri that provide evidence of shifting Mediterranean ecologies, medieval and renaissance texts that discuss the effects of the Little Ice Age, scientific and navigational instruments and maps from the Age of Exploration and the period of the Columbian Exchange; publishing materials from the Harper and Random House archives; New Deal photographs and reports from the Frances Perkins and Pare Lorentz papers; Posters and printed work representing the Age of Aquarius, the rise of ecology, and the anti-nuclear movement, and finally contemporary materials related to climate activism and the Green New Deal. The exhibition will be on view at the Columbia Kempner Gallery, April 22- September 23, 2022.