On this episode, the Humanities Center's 2024-2025 Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities, film scholar Dr. Daryl Meador, sits down with Michael Borshuk to speak about her research on West Texas in American cinema. Annotating five notable films that depict the region onscreen, Dr. Meador comments on settler colonialism, silent movies, John Wayne, Paul Newman, Larry McMurtry, New Hollywood, and the Coen Brothers, among other figures and contexts.

Some supplementary resources from this episode's conversation:

Christopher Kelly, "No Country for Bad Movies," a Texas Monthly article on the best Texas movies ever.

Charles Goodnight's 1916 silent movie Old Texas, from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image.

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On this episode, we’re exploring the Humanities Center’s year-long programming theme, “Celebrating Indigenous Resilience: Commemorating the Red River War and Honoring the Vibrancy of Native American History and Culture on the Southern Plains.” Dr. John William Nelson from TTU's Department of History gives us some vital context for thinking about the Red River War and its relationship to Indigenous history and culture. Then we survey some of the highpoints of our programming from the fall semester: talks by the archaeologist J. Brett Cruse and the Kiowa beadworkers Vanessa Jennings and Summer Morgan, a historical commemoration in Palo Duro Canyon, and an exhibition of the Southern Plains handgame here on the TTU campus.

Check out material referenced in this episode:

J. Brett Cruse's book Battles of the Red River War

An oral history with Vanessa Jennings

Art by George Curtis Levi

Texas Monthly article about the September 28 commemoration of the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon

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Could a gaggle of monkeys randomly typing produce a literary classic? Could they by chance produce the complete works of Shakespeare, as many have speculated in an ongoing thought experiment for over a century now.

These questions are the starting point for a post-script conversation to our 2023-2024 Value/Values programming. On this episode, Michael Borshuk chats with TTU faculty members Dr. Heather Warren-Crow, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, and Dr. TJ Geiger II, Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric, to talk about their recent research projects. In a wide-ranging conversation that begins with Dr. Warren-Crow’s newest book and its attention the idea that monkeys might randomly write the works of Shakespeare, we discuss animals, culture, the divine, how to define humanity, and whether the act of producing that definition continues to matter at all?

Click here for more on Dr. Warren-Crow's latest book Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence.

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