This week Dr. Zackary Graham drops in to talk about one of America's most important environmental stewards--the crawfish--and why their disappearance should worry us all.

About our guest:

Zack is an evolutionary and behavioral ecologist who studies crayfish diversity. The goal of his research is to untangle the ecological and evolutionary complexities that have led crayfishes to be amongst the most successful freshwater animals within the Eastern United States and beyond.
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He is the author of an upcoming popular science book (available 1/6/26) on crayfish entitled Crayfish, Crawfish, Crawdad: The Biology and Conservation of North America's Favorite Crustaceans published by UNC Press.

Egyptologists Dr. Julia Troche and Matt Szafran join in this week to talk about the history behind The Fifth Element and how the anxieties of the 90s are reflected in Luc Besson's campy space opera.

About our guests:

Dr. Julia Troche is an Egyptologist and Associate Professor of History. In 2022 she was awarded her university's highest teaching award followed by the Missouri Governor's Award for Education Excellence. She is committed to advocating for students, early career scholars, and contingent faculty, and fostering inclusive spaces for learning about the ancient world. She is dedicated to the university Public Affairs mission, evinced by her numerous Service-Learning courses, public lectures, and community engagements, such as co-curating with Bryan Brinkman and student input an exhibition of antiquities at the Springfield Art Museum (Ancient Artifacts Abroad, spring 2024).

Julia's areas of instruction and research include social history, religion, archaeology, digital humanities, and reception studies of antiquity. Julia received her PhD from Brown University's Department of in Egyptology & Assyriology in 2015, and her BA in History from UCLA in 2008. She serves as Committee Chair (2024-2027) for her field’s annual, international conference (the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting) and as co-chair (2023-2026) for the Archaeology of Egypt sessions at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.

Julia is an active member of her field, sitting on numerous international, national, and regional Boards and committees. Since 2022, she is a membership-elected Governor on the American Research Center in Egypt’s Board of Governors (a 501c3 non-profit, cultural institution in Egypt; www.arce.org). She co-founded both the ARCE, Missouri Chapter (Past President and Vice President, current Director focusing on Finance) and the annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium. She attended the HERS Leadership Institute in 2024 for women leaders in higher education (hersnetwork.org). She has served her campus community since arriving here in 2017 as a Bear Bridge mentor (2023, Outstanding Bear Bridge Faculty Mentor award), Safe-Zone Faculty Advisor, Advisor for the Ancient Worlds Club, Co-Advisor for History Club, and supporting her department through extensive service, including—at various times—chairing Undergraduate Committee and Personnel Committee, sitting on about three-dozen MA committees, serving on five search committees (chairing two), and serving as a past Faculty Senate and College Council department representative.

Matt Szafran is an independent researcher specialising in the study of ancient tools and technologies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Trustee of the Friends of the Petrie Museum. His current research focusses on the manufacture and use of stone palettes in Predynastic Egypt, using experimental archaeology and advanced imaging technologies, such as microscopy and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to complement textual studies. Matt has published and lectured on this topic, and is currently incorporating this research into a book discussing the design, manufacture, and possible uses of Predynastic palettes. His research interests also include the popular perception, reception, and representation of Egypt depicted in mass media, in particular late 20th and 21st century movies and television.

This week Kate Sheppard and Thomas Lecaque drop in to talk about the greatest romcom of all time.

About our guests:

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Sheppard’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain (Lexington, 2013). Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. Sheppard is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (Archaeopress, 2018). Sheppard’s monograph, Tea on the Terrace, is about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.

Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age was published in July 2024. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and was a top 6 Reader’s Choice non-fiction book on Goodreads.

Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others.

This week Dr. Rachel Gross drops in to explain the rise of outdoor goods manufacturers and how they sold us on going outside.

About our guest:

Rachel Gross is an environmental, cultural, and public historian specializing in the history of the modern U.S. Her research and teaching interests center on business, consumer culture, and gender, and she is especially interested in what seemingly ordinary consumer goods tell us about identity and power. She teaches courses on capitalism, commodities, women and gender, and public history.

This week historians John McManus and Waitman Beorn drop in to talk about the history behind Hamburger Hill, arguably the greatest war film we ever forgot.

About our guests:

John C. McManus is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T). This professorship is bestowed by the University of Missouri Board of Curators on the most outstanding scholars in the University of Missouri system. McManus is the first ever Missouri S&T faculty member in the humanities to be named Curators’ Distinguished Professor. As one of the nation’s leading military historians, and the author of fifteen well received books on the topic, he is in frequent demand as a speaker and expert commentator. In addition to dozens of local and national radio programs, he has appeared on Cnn.com, Fox News, C-Span, the Military Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Netflix, the Smithsonian Network, the History Channel and PBS, among others. He also served as historical advisor for the bestselling book and documentary Salinger, the latter of which appeared nationwide in theaters and on PBS’s American Masters Series. During the 2018-2019 academic year, he was in residence at the U.S. Naval Academy as the Leo A. Shifrin Chair of Naval and Military History, a distinguished visiting professorship. His current project is a major three volume history of the U.S. Army in the Pacific/Asia theater during World War II. He is the host of two podcasts, Someone Talked! in tandem with the National D-Day Memorial, and We Have Ways of Making You Talk in the USA alongside Al Murray and James Holland.

Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an associate professor in History at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. His first book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard University Press) Dr. Beorn is also the author of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and has recently finished a book on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine. That book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv was released in August 2024 from Nebraska University Press. Between the Wires was recognised as a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the United States.

He is currently on research leave thanks to an AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement Fellowship. This fellowship supports his work on a project entitled Visualizing Janowska: Creating a Digital Architectural Model of a Nazi Concentration Camp. This interdisciplinary project will build a digital reconstruction of the Janowska concentration camp based on historical sources as most of the site is gone today. Dr. Beorn is managing a team of architects and digital modellers to accomplish this and is partnered with the Holocaust Education Trust, the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Lviv Center for Urban History, the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Lab, and the Holocaust Center North.

Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studie

This week author Matthew Davis drops in to talk about the complex history and significance of Mount Rushmore, including its ties to the Lakota people, the role of Gutzon Borglum, and the evolving meaning of the monument in contemporary society. We also dig in on the misconceptions surrounding Rushmore, the importance of indigenous perspectives, and the future of the site in terms of stewardship and representation.

About our guest:

Matthew Davis is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. He is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale and the founder of the Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University. His new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, is available everywhere.

Sahara had everything going for it: a big cast led by ultra hot actors Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, a devoted fan base of author Clive Cussler’s novels, and a big budget courtesy of Disney. And then it came out and flopped. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not fun and it doesn’t mean that we can’t have real conversations about history. In fact, the movie gives us the perfect opportunity to talk about artifact recovery and repatriation. Joining me today are Colin Colbourn and Derek Abbey from Project Recover, a nonprofit group dedicated to searching for and locating American MIAs and POWs from conflicts around the world. this is a cool conversation about both the movie and the process of bringing American soldiers home.

This week Max Perry Mueller drops in to talk about Wakara, a Ute man who shaped the modern American West. We also talk about the complexities of Native American identity, the impact of Manifest Destiny, and the ethical considerations in writing Native history. Max also highlights the importance of cultural exchange, environmental stewardship, and the ongoing struggles for repatriation and rematriation of Indigenous remains.

About our guest:

Max Perry Mueller (PhD, Harvard University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. He is also a fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies and teaches in the Department of History, the Honors Program, and the Global Studies program.

Mueller is a theorist and historian of race and religion in American history, with particular interest in Indigenous and African-American religious experiences, epistemologies, and cosmologies. The central animating question of his scholarship is how the act of writing—especially the writing of historical narratives—has affected the creation and contestation of "race" as a category of political and religious division in American history.

His first book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), examines how the three original American races—"red," "black," and "white"—were constructed as literary projects before these racial categories were read onto bodies of Americans of Native, African, and European descent. Choice described Race and the Making of the Mormon People as an "outstanding analysis of the role of race among Mormons." The book was featured in The Atlantic and Harvard Divinity School Bulletin and has been taught at, among others, Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford Universities. His next book, Wakara's America, will be the first full-length biography of the complex and often paradoxical Ute warrior chief, horse thief, slave trader, settler colonist, one-time Mormon, and Indian resistance leader.

Mueller's research and teaching also connect with his public scholarship. Mueller has written on religion, race, and politics for outlets including Slate, The New Republic, and The Atlantic. He also co-founded Religion & Politics, the online journal of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, whose mission is to bring the best scholarship on religion and American public life to audiences beyond the academy.