Office Hours

Baby bonuses, enhanced parental leave, and childcare access are public policies aimed at slowing the declining birth rate —  but by themselves, they are unlikely to change anyone’s mind about having children. Faced with an aging population’s need for health care and pensions, how can policymakers realistically intervene? Is the birth rate an effective policy target in the first place? In this episode, Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science Alex Jingwei He joins Host Priscilla Lee ’25 to ask what policies can (and cannot) do to encourage childbirth in their shared home of Hong Kong and East Asia. More broadly, this episode is about the role of public policy — and policy scientists — in complex social issues.  

Grafting is an essential agricultural technique for making trees bear sweet-tasting fruit. In the ancient Mediterranean, it was the only known way for humans to modify nature. The graft, then, was and continues to be a prompt to rethink our relationship with the nonhuman world. As Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Mattthew Westermayer asks, “What is nature insofar that a tree is so malleable?” In conversation with host Priscilla Lee ’25, he traces the roots of grafting as metaphor in Greek and Roman literature, and how it grows beyond metaphor to become spiritual practice—particularly, in Ephrem the Syrian’s Christian hymns. Once you see arboricultural practice as a way of understanding the world, Professor Westermayer promises you won’t stop finding it, everywhere you look. 

How is Blackness shared? Though it is obviously important to recognize different experiences of Blackness, Professor of Black Studies Carol Bailey believes “there is more to be gained from acknowledging what Black people share.” Beginning with a passage from A Brief History of Seven Killings by Jamaican author Marlon James, Professor Bailey’s conversation with host Priscilla Lee ’25 and Evelyn Chi ’25 spans Toni Morrison novels, Caribbean histories, and Amherst College anecdotes to trace a story of solidarity and community across the diaspora. 

Galaxies are like communities: Stars cycle through life, leave matter behind for future generations, interact with other galaxies, and come together to build communities bigger than themselves. At least, that’s how Assistant Professor of Astronomy Mia de los Reyes likes to frame it — a framing she contrasts with the somewhat violent and imperialistic terms scientists have traditionally used to describe astronomical processes.

In this episode, de los Reyes sits down with Host Priscilla Lee ’25 not only to explain how galaxies form and how the Milky Way came to be, but also to critically reflect on how we talk about and study the night sky. Their conversaion dives into how the field of astronomy has interacted with indigenous peoples, other communities, and sacred land — historically and in the present.

Can videogames be poetic? In this recorded live show, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson chats with Host Priscilla Lee ’25 and Evelyn Chi ’25 about the short, unusual videogames that he and others make—which he calls “game poems”—as a lyric practice. With a live playthrough, audience Q&A, and discussion of Magnuson’s new book, Game Poems (Amherst College Press, 2023). 

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have such different histories, cultures, and racializations, not to mention the vast heterogeneity within each group. Why do we put them together in #AAPIHeritageMonth, or study them together in an AAPI literature course? Should we separate them in our scholarship and activism? Visiting Assistant Professor Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito and Priscilla Lee ’25 interrogate the problems of “AAPI” as a term, and also explore what generative tensions it can offer — through reading “Hooked” by Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kjiner, as well as discussing Okinawan indigeneity under Japanese and American imperialism. 

Stories of post-race piazza brawls, saints falling down stairs, jockey bribery, Etruscan cowboys, terracotta workshop mishaps, and other historical shenanigans are told by archaeologist Nora Donoghue in this fun, end-of-year episode all about the Italian city of Siena (which is way cooler than Florence). 

Zillow-scrolling, interior design Pinterest, house hunting shows… Our living spaces are so important to us because they are an expression of our identities. To apply this principle to history, studying houses can shed light on the societies and values of people who lived in them: How much did privacy matter? Did business belong at home? What was their hierarchy of room subdivision needs? Archaeologist Nora Donoghue takes us through the centuries, from Etruscan stone houses and Roman villas, to Victorian ribbon rooms and Massachusetts hunting lodges, to explore the evolution of domestic architecture and what the archaeology tells us about the people it housed.

Content Warning: Mentions of sexual violence from 21:45 onward. 

The patriarchal families of ancient Rome—headed by a father with extreme authority—may seem like an inflexible social structure, but there are exceptions to every rule: Foreigners, sex workers, and enslaved people did not have access to the legal institution of marriage, and formed families beyond the bounds of convention. Their stories aren’t recorded in letters or histories written by elite men, but they do come down to us as the plot of Roman comedies, like those written by Plautus and Terence. In this episode, Priscilla Lee ’25 chats with Prof. Hannah Sorscher to explore a few of these plays, both as evidence for unconventional families in real life, and as subversive yet subtle criticisms of the Roman family ideal. 

What does it mean to be a writer in exile, and more specifically, how does that affect the writing and the language? As a Russian émigré in Berlin and later the United States, Vladimir Nabokov worked with publishers in multiple countries and languages throughout his career. In this episode, Assistant Professor Luke Parker discusses the multilingual joys of reading Nabokov, and the many layers of his writing, meant to shine through in translation, adaptation, and his varied audiences.

As the Soviets forged ahead to modern and socialist art, Russian exiles in Paris and Berlin looked to young artists — like Vladimir Nabokov — to continue in the Russian tradition. Nabokov, whose father was a prominent politician in the short-lived Russian Republic, did begin his writing career in Russian émigré journals and publishing houses, but his eventual success came from the English-language and Hollywood-adapted masterpiece, Lolita (1955).

In part one of the conversation, Amherst's Visiting Assistant Professor Luke Parker goes through Nabokov’s “westernized” childhood and exile in Berlin to show that his career was multilingual and transnational throughout his life. Neither neglectful of nor limited to Russian language and readership, Nabokov’s work sheds light on important questions about emigrant (vs. immigrant) identity, how Russia fits in the West, and the cross-cultural possibilities in translation, adaptation, and multilingual literature.