Episode 2: Davarian Baldwin Blends Ideas and Narrative

03/01/22 • 42 min

In this episode, Kate talks with historian and American Studies scholar Davarian Baldwin about his books, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type, 2021) and Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC Press, 2007). Listen to find out how Dr. Baldwin gradually came around to narrative writing, how he procrastinates by crafting phrases in his head, and the unexpected piece of public writing he has coming out this year.

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Episode 1: Megan Kate Nelson Experiments with Structure

For the debut episode of Drafting the Past, host Kate Carpenter talks to Megan Kate Nelson, author of Three-Cornered War (2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in history) and the forthcoming Saving Yellowstone, about her exit from academia, how she uses fiction for narrative structure inspiration, and why she prefers writing in cafes (unless there's something really juicy happening there).

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Episode 3: Bathsheba Demuth Evokes a Place

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Kate talks with environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth about her book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (Norton, 2019), her essays, and how she helps readers to feel, see, and even smell the places she's writing about. Listen to learn how she organizes her many forms of research, the writers she's looking to for inspiration now, and what advice she would give to herself in grad school.