This episode is the recording of an event held at Swarthmore College on October 27, 2025. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd and Nayanika Ghosh discussed the history of discursive and institutional tactics deployed to delegitimize knowledge-making in the humanities and in the sciences.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian of US colleges and universities. Shepherd is the author of Resistance from the Right (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and host of the American Campus Podcast. Her forthcoming book projects are Degrees of Liberation with John R. Legg and Inventing the Liberal University.
Nayanika Ghosh is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her research brings interdisciplinary scholarship on science, race, and gender in conversation with the histories of U.S. higher education, the New Left, and the Cold War. She is currently working on her first monograph, Genes and the Left: Sociobiology and the Backlash Against Radical Science.
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Podalot is the podcast of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, an interdisciplinary research center that supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions. The podcast facilitates conversations about critical investigations into higher education and the liberal arts. You can subscribe on Spotify, Amazon or Apple Podcasts to keep up to date with new episodes as they are released.
