In Conversation

Dean Michael Horswell engages in conversation with Marquese McFerguson, Ph.D., as they discuss navigating race, culture, and gender with poetry and spoken word.
Marquese McFerguson is an Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication, in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, at Florida Atlantic University.
His work explores the interconnected dynamics of race, culture, gender, and media. His essay, "When Hip Hop Speaks, We Listen" won the John T. Warren Top Paper Award in 2018. Last year he won the Art Bochner Outstanding Doctoral Research Scholar Award from the University of South Florida. He is a master of Slam Poetry and Spoken Word.

Dean Michael Horswell engages In Conversation with Clevis Headley, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy. Dr. Headley specializes in Africana philosophy, critical race theory, epistemology, analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics. He has co-edited three books, George Yancy: A Critical Introduction (2021), Haiti and the Americas (2013), and Shifting the Geography of Reason (2007). He is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Race, Philosophy, and Being: Working Through the Contestability of Race and Philosophy.

Dean Horswell engages in conversation with Alejandro Sánchez–Samper, Professor of Music, as they discuss honoring and bringing new life to Columbian Andean regional music.
Professor Sánchez–Samper is the Assistant Director of Commercial Music in the Department of Music, in the School of the Arts, for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, at Florida Atlantic University.
Alejandro Sánchez–Samper was recently nominated for a Latin Grammy and is currently working on a documentary project about Columbian Andean music. He received an ASCAP fellowship award to study film scoring at the Aspen Music Festival and School in Aspen, where he was mentored by various distinguished film composers such as Howard Shore, Jeff Rona, Thomas Newman and John Williams. He has written, produced and recorded music for film, orchestra, stage and commercial music projects. He is the faculty supervisor for Hoot/Wisdom Recordings and teaches Audio Engineering for the Musician, Live Sound Reinforcement, Computer Music Sequencing and Introduction to Music Business.

Professor of English Oliver Buckton joins Dean Michael Horswell in our latest edition of In Conversation to discuss his research on World War II espionage and his new book Counterfeit Spies: How World War II Intelligence Operations Shaped Cold War Spy Fiction (2024).
Oliver Buckton is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University, and has taught at FAU since 1994. He teaches courses in Victorian and modern British literature, film, literary theory, and espionage fiction. His recent research explores the intersections of intelligence history, political history, and espionage fiction. He is the author of Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (1998), Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body (2007), Espionage in British Literature and Film Since 1900: The Changing Enemy (2015), The Many Facets of Diamonds Are Forever: James Bond on Page and Screen (2019) and The World is Not Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming (2021) and