Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Caroline Crampton is a writer and a podcaster, and the author of two books. The Way to the Sea, published in 2019, recounts the stories, literature, and history about the Thames Estuary in the U.K. Her second book, published in 2024 and the subject of today’s interview, is A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. Crampton creates and hosts the award-winning detective fiction podcast Shedunnit, curates articles as editor-in-chief of The Browser, and writes reviews and essays for such publications as Time, Literary Hub and The Guardian.

Recorded 8/29/24.

Beth O’Leary is a Professor Emerita at New Mexico State University, whose areas of interest include both cultural anthropology and archaeology. She is one of the creators and experts in Space Archaeology and Heritage, investigating the heritage status of the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base site on the Moon. In 2010, she and colleagues successfully nominated objects and structures at the Tranquility Base to the State Registers of Cultural Properties in both California and New Mexico. Her books include: The Final Mission: Preserving NASA’s Apollo Sites (co-authored with L.Westwood and M.W. Donaldson in 2017), (2015) The Archaeology and Heritage of the Hu...

Ian Buruma is a Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. Originally from the Netherlands, he is a prolific writer with broad interests, including Japanese and Chinese culture and history, organized religion and religious intolerance, and intellectual and political freedom or lack thereof. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, New Republic, New Yorker, and The Guardian and has also written two novels. His most recent book, published earlier this year and the subject of today’s interview, is Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah. Buruma provides historical and biograp...

This interview is dedicated to Samantha Keleher Bursum, who died on March 1 of 2024 in a car accident at the age of 14. She participated in this interview, at age 11, with her mother, Lori Keleher, who is a philosophy professor at New Mexico State University. Together they share the joys and benefits of philosophical conversations with children, starting from a surprisingly early age.

Recorded 12/29/20.

Celene Ibrahim is a multidisciplinary scholar specializing in Islamic intellectual history, gender studies, and ethics. Her 2020 monograph, Women and Gender in the Qur'an, won the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award and was featured by the American Academy of Religion for Women's History Month. Ibrahim is also the author of Islam and Monotheism (2022), an accessible primer on core Islamic beliefs. Ibrahim also writes on spiritual care, chaplaincy, religious leadership, and related themes.

Ibrahim offers courses and lectures at educational and civic institutions around the world and is a trusted voice for media outlets, including NPR...

Jamie Bronstein has been a history professor at New Mexico State University since 1996. She is the author of six books about American and British History: Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (published in 1999); Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in 19th-century Britain (2008); Transatlantic radical: John Francis Bray (2009); with Andrew Harris, Empire, State and Society: Modern Britain, 1830-present (2013), and The Happiness of the British Working Class (2023). Today’s interview focuses on her book, published in 2016, Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of American Inequality.

Recorded 12/17/20.

Melissa Jacoby is a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches commercial and bankruptcy law. Melissa is a frequent commentator in the news media and has spoken with thousands of people about debt, lending, commercial law, and bankruptcy. In 2021 the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, appointed her to help design educational programming for the nation’s bankruptcy judges. She is a recipient of multiple awards, including the Grant Gilmore Award for scholarship from the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and the Byrd Award for creative teaching. Melissa’s firs...

Carl Elliott is a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a recipient of the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. His work focuses on the influence of market forces on medicine, the ethics of enhancement technologies, research ethics, the philosophy of psychiatry, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walker Percy. His articles have appeared in such major publications as The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic Monthly, often covering dark topics with satiric humor. 

Elliott has authored or edited seven books, including White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of M...

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge. He is a member of an international team of around 1400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists who use the CERN particle accelerator in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics, such as the nature of dark matter and why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. Harry has written two popular science books. The first, How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang, was published in...

David Jacobson, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida. Today's interview, focuses on his book, Of Virgins and Martyrs: Women and Sexuality in Global Conflict. Published in 2013, the book explores the interplay among cultural, political, economic, and historical forces that shape gender relations and violence, individualistic vs. communitarian values, and tensions between globalism and traditional, tribalist societies. Jacobson is the co-founder of The Global Resolve Initiative, which helps villagers in developing countries develop alternative energy technologies, with a pilot project in Ghana. Global Resolve received the 2009 Creasman Award for Excellence.

Recorded 1/19/21.