Sophie Harman

10/05/21 • 97 min

Professor Harman joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. She starts off discussing with Brent her childhood and growing up on a farm in Buckinghamshire in SE England, her interests and aspirations during that time and the family dynamics regarding politics and who was expected to take over the farm each generation. She had a gap year, then went to Manchester for undergrad and graduate training, got into global public health, political economy, and traveled to Tanzania, and then as she tells it was able to get a job in London at City University after approaching some folks from there when they were hiring, at a BISA, after two gin and tonics. She discusses the burgeoning section and field of global public health and how that slowly grew, but remained a somewhat smaller section even up until ‘the big one’, the current pandemic of Covid-19 that spread across the world in 2020. She is a film maker, the first one on this podcast, and her film, Pili, is an amazing accomplishment of a movie that was produced and filmed in Tanzania, about a woman who gets a chance to get a better job/role but is keeping a secret about her HIV-positive status. It is available on Google Play, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and other sites:
https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=tn6QEm-KjOU.P
Professor Harman finishes up her conversation discussing how she approaches writing, how when and where she and fellow global health scholars Sara Davies and Claire Wenham first discussed the possibilities of Covid-19 becoming the pandemic it is today, Polyani, the upcoming ISA Presidential election and friend of the pod Prof Laura Shepherd, and more!

Previous Episode

Rebecca Adler-Nissen

Professor Rebecca Adler-Nissen joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Adler-Nissen is a proflic scholar known for her work on diplomacy, integration, practice theory, and her deep knowledge and use of social theory. She talks to Brent about growing up in Denmark, but also Israel and the United States. Before going to uni, Rebecca spent some time working on boats, sailing at one point to the Canary Islands where she looked for more work at the age of 18. She eventually returned to Europe, attending both the University of Copenhagen and Sciences Po. Rebecca went to Copenhagen as well for her Master's and PhD, at a time when the 'Copenhagen school' was gaining momentum and the lectures and conversations in her program were filled with excitement. She talks to Brent about writing her PhD at Copenhagen, how she got into the topic of European integration to 'update' her grandmother who had fought in the resistance against the Germans, on the possibilities of Germans being the ones after the Berlin Wall fell who were building a peaceful order. Rebecca reflects on her visiting position at the EUI in Florence, before defending her thesis and going on the market in 2009-2010. It was in the 2010s when Rebecca burst onto the scene with a flurry of now iconic publications, and she talks about what went into that. She shares her perspective on writing, how she decompresses with her family and through running, her approach to reviewing manuscript, and more!

Next Episode

Tarak Barkawi

Professor Tarak Barkawi joins Brent this week. He discusses growing up in Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s, in a very politically aware family, and his varied interests in military history but also LA’s punk rock scene, having a school that doubled as a fallout shelter and his first encounters with eye-opening racial violence. He talks about his decision to go to George Washington University, getting his master’s at the LSE, his brief overlap with John Vincent before the latter died, the influence of Bud Duvall at Minnesota, his work with Mark Laffey, going on the market, getting jobs at Wales-Aber, Cambridge and now back to the LSE. He discusses his approach to writing, how he handles stress, and his predictions on conferences and academia post-Covid and the need to get back to meeting in person.