Stay ConnectedDo you have a curious mind? Do you sometimes daydream about having a PhD in literature, science, or history?
Go inside the minds of PhDs at Harvard University with the Veritalk podcast. Veritalk is produced at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In each three-episode miniseries of Veritalk, you’ll hear how PhD students from different fields are trying to answer really big questions about the world.
Copyright: © The President and Fellows of Harvard College
When developers try to revitalize the nightlife in Johannesburg, not everyone is invited to the party. PhD candidate Chrystel Oloukoi explores the ways that race, gender, and class shape the nightlife culture in Johannesburg and Lagos. The last episode in our series on the secret life of cities.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Crowell
Special thanks: Chrystel Oloukoi, Pien Huang, Emma Jacobs, Sarah Montgomery, and Graham Ball
Potholes are an everyday annoyance for commuters, but they're a really complex problem for cities to solve. Many cities, including Boston, have 311 apps that allow citizens to report potholes in their own neighborhoods. But Elijah de la Campa is curious to know whether those apps are actually improving citizen participation in local government.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Crowell
Special Thanks: Graham Ball, Elijah de la Campa, the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the What Works Cities Initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
One jetlagged night in Manila leads PhD candidate Justin Stern into the world of business process outsourcing. The first episode in Veritalk's series on the Secret Life of Cities.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Crowell
Special thanks: Justin Stern, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Anne Brown, and Graham Ball.
Additional sound recorded by Kevin Luce, whose work you can find at www.freesound.org
Why isn’t King Kong scaling the Empire State Building right now? Should we worry about Godzilla rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean? Shane Campbell-Staton, co-host of the podcast The Biology of Superheroes and Harvard PhD ’15 in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, talks about our favorite movie monsters, and some of the biological processes that could make them come to life.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Crowell
Special thanks Shane Campbell-Staton and Graham Ball.
Some monsters live inside us. PhD candidate in Biological Sciences in Public Health Maddy McFarland studies Trypanosoma cruzi, a parasite that transforms its shape to sneak inside our cells and makes us sick. The scariest part: Our cells can’t signal that they’re infected until it’s too late.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Crowell
Special thanks to the lab of Barbara Burleigh, professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and to the National Institutes of Health, which funds the research of the Burleigh lab.
Mermaids: They’re cute, innocent, and great singers, right? Think again! PhD candidate in Celtic Languages and Literatures Greg Darwin explains why you wouldn’t want to meet a mermaid in a dark aquatic alley. He also talks about selkie tales – and legendary creatures that live at the edge of humanity.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Crowell
PhD graduate in Sociology Monica Bell’s interviews with poor youth of color in Baltimore led her to formulate the idea of “legal estrangement.” While the press focuses on a “trust gap” between black youth and the police, Monica believes that the issue is far deeper. Her interviews revealed a generation of young Americans who feel both stateless and powerless.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Wilson
During World War II, many Greek people had to flee their homes and seek safety in the Middle East. Today, Syrian refugees flee violence in the Middle East, and wind up on the shores of Greece. Argyro Nicolaou, a PhD student in Comparative Literature, wants us to take a second look at the literature and art that displaced people produce, particularly in the Mediterranean. Can we find common ground between displaced Greeks in World War II, and displaced Syrians today?
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Wilson
Almost no outsiders have visited the internally displaced persons camps in Burma where over 140,000 Rohingya Muslims are forced to live. Cresa Pugh, a PhD student in sociology, was able to visit last year. She saw a community in turmoil – but many Burmese people deny that the Rohingya are being persecuted. Cresa asks why marginalized people like the Rohingya are often blamed for their own suffering.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Wilson
In our last episode about plumage, Chloe Chapin, PhD student in American Studies, explores how humans have used fashion to express gender and status -- and how present-day fashion can bend the "rules" we've come to know.
The Veritalk Team:
Host/Producer: Anna Fisher-Pinkert
Executive Producer: Ann Hall
Sound Designer: Ian Coss
Logo Designer: Emily Wilson
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