Fransha Dace hails from the South Side Chicago neighborhood of South Shore, and is currently a Ph.D candidate at the School of the Environment at Yale University. In this conversation, she talks about the relationship between climate and language, and how she has used her knowledge of Swahili to study the effects of climate change in Tanzania. She discusses her climate research, which pairs Dar es Salaam and Chicago, and examines how climate change affects the residents of these cities. She then speaks about what it means to be a researcher, who gets to conduct research, and how she hopes that ..read more

Timi Odunjo is a senior at Columbia University majoring in Drama and Theatre Arts. In this conversation, he speaks about studying the Yoruba language at Columbia and the cinematic traditions that have inspired him to become a filmmaker. He also discusses his first film, a documentary titled Ballet U ..read more

Professor Millicent Marcus of Yale University speaks about her life and work as a scholar of Italian literature. We focus in particular on her witnessing of and participation in two world-historical events: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1966 flood of the River Arno in Florence. She describes her experiences as one of the “Angeli del fango,” the young people who helped to recover books, manuscripts, and works of art from the damage of the floodwaters.  ..read more

Agi Legutko, Instructor of Yiddish at Columbia University, speaks about her journey to uncover her Jewish roots, the Yiddish language past and present, and her work on the Mapping Yiddish New York project, which maps the use of the Yiddish language in New York City.  Yiddish at Columbia: https://germanic.columbia.edu/programs/yiddish Mapping Yiddish New York: https://jewishstudiescolumbia.com/myny/ Naomi Prawer Kadar Fellowship: https://www.iijs.columbia.edu/naomi-fellowship ..read more

Heli Sirviö, instructor of Finnish and Swedish discusses growing up speaking both languages. She talks about how the Finnish people see themselves with respect to their neighbors and the rest of the world. Then, she gets into the Kalevala, which is the Finnish national epic. She discusses the world of the Kalevala, and how JRR Tolkien was inspired by this epic poem when he wrote the Lord of the Rings sequence.  ..read more