The Past and Future of the Humanities? A Conversation with Katherine Fleming

04/19/23 • 45 min

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In the wake of the pandemic and persistent underfunding, cultural and educational institutions in the United States today are increasingly confronted with an uncertain fate. How can they sustain growth, enfranchise new audiences, and increase diversity at a time when “the death of the humanities” looms on the horizon?

In this episode of Then & Now, Katherine E. Fleming, the president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, brings her rich experiences as historian, academic administrator, and now chief executive of a major philanthropic foundation to make sense of the problems faced by higher education and cultural institutions in the United States. Dr. Fleming talks about her academic trajectory, the paradoxical finances of American universities, and what her plans are for the Getty.

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From Resistance to Representation in Transnational Hip-Hop: A Conversation with Samuel Lamontagne

Hip-hop culture and rap music are often assumed to be quintessentially American art forms. But by the late 1970s, hip-hop had transcended its roots in the US coasts. In France, artists from the African diaspora experimented with hip-hop, using it as an art form to articulate Blackness at a time when their community had little visibility in public life. Hip-hop became a critical tool for crafting Black visions of representation and resistance.

This intersection of music, culture and politics—ranging from Paris to Los Angeles—is the focus of this episode, which features Dr. Samuel Lamontagne, a scholar of hip-hop and electronic music. Dr. Lamontagne combines his extensive research and personal experience to explain the rich landscape of global hip-hop, and how music became a crossroads for the meeting of transnational Black politics and aesthetics.

Samuel Lamontagne is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and the Department of History at UCLA. His research focuses on hip-hop and electronic dance music in Los Angeles, and in the African diaspora more generally. A former co-editor-in-chief of Ethnomusicology Review, he has also authored a book on electronic music.

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The Global Debt Crisis and the Neoliberal Economy: A Conversation with Ahilan Kadirgamar and Jamie Martin

In the decade since the global financial crisis of 2007-8, a number of countries have faced and succumbed to sovereign-debt crises and declared bankruptcy. After Greece, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Zambia, and Lebanon, Sri Lanka has recently joined the ranks of countries felled by economic downturn, whose harsh impact will be felt by its people for a long time to come. In this context, the question arises: what role have international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank played in these economic crises? Have they helped or hurt the economic prospects of the Global South?

To discuss this question, we are joined by Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist from the University of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, and Jamie Martin, a historian at Harvard University and the author of The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance.