Teaching Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, When All the Men Wore Hats

When the writing writes itself

November 20, 2025 • by Elizabeth Mirabelle and Susan Cheever

I met Susan Cheever at the Carl Schurz Park dog run, on the Upper East Side, to discuss her latest book, When All the Men Wore Hats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025). It’s her usual morning haunt: a place where she gives her beloved Corgi a bit of free-roaming exercise, ...

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, <em>When All the Men Wore Hats</em>

Education

A Black Pedagogy Is an Engaged Pedagogy

How an American Studies professor went to law school and became a teacher for the twenty-first century

April 28, 2022 • by Duchess Harris

Why did I become a student again when I could have more easily turned my attention only to the research and writing that would have advanced my chosen academic career? The answer is simple: I felt it was time to apply my political and theoretical beliefs to action-oriented work that ...

Activism

Teaching Through the Pandemic

In a course about memorializing HIV-AIDS, students learned about community by making one

April 21, 2021 • by Dan Royles

_____ Everyone involved in education has found the past year to be a special challenge for teaching, learning, and simply making it from one day to another. But how do you teach students about a pandemic during a pandemic? In December 2020, queer historian Dan Royles interviewed Theodore (Ted) Kerr and his ...

Higher Ed

Brave New Classroom

Lessons from the first six weeks

May 13, 2020 • by Hannah Leffingwell

What felt at the time like the worst-case scenario has now become our “new normal.” Emails warn of budget catastrophes, lost tuition, low enrollment. Amid fears that this crisis portends the end of higher education as we know it, I've started to wonder whether that is necessarily a bad thing. ...

Multi Media

Baton Rouge, Christian Intellectuals, and Teaching Trump

Past Present Episode 48

August 30, 2016 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

In this week's episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia debate flood relief in Louisiana, the disappearance of Christian intellectuals, and teaching Trump in the classroom. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: More than two feet of rain brought death and destruction to southern Louisiana recently. Natalia addressed ...

Baton Rouge, Christian Intellectuals, and Teaching Trump

Education

Refuge and Exile: Illuminating an Academic Contradiction

March 5, 2014 • by Marianne Le Nabat

This is the prepared text of a presentation to the General Seminar commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the University in Exile. I would like to begin my remarks by saying that my own experience at the NSSR has been extremely positive on an intellectual level. When I arrived to the philosophy ...

Refuge and Exile: Illuminating an Academic Contradiction

Education

The Case for Thoughtful Educational Assessment

December 10, 2013 • by Beth Kalikoff

A long-ago mathematics colleague at another university told a story about his first semester in the classroom. He threw a bunch of proofs on the blackboard and then, in the last five minutes, asked if there were any questions. There were no questions. He was unnerved. These students were good. The ...