Episodes

As Jacke and Emma travel to England for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Emma Smith about her book...

Is there such a thing as a general human nature? And if so, does Shakespeare serve as a "faithful mirror" to it, as Dr. Johnson claimed? In this episode, Jacke talks to Oxford University's David Womersley about his book Think...

As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Emma Smith about her book ⁠ Porta...

As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Marion Turner about her book Chau...

As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Marion Turner about her book, The...

As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to Will Tosh, Director of Research at Shakespeare's Globe Theat...

In addition to being an accomplished lawyer and a highly influential music critic, the nineteenth-century German Romantic Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) also wrote pioneering works of crime and horror fiction, inc...

The 1920s were a tumultuous time for Russia, as the nation careened from the aftermath of revolution to the death of Lenin, the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the slide toward Stalinist totalitarianism. Given all of t...

In this episode, Jacke talks to author Eileen Sperry about her book This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric , which examines how the lyric poetry of Shakespeare and his contemporaries shaped our understanding...

The "Forgotten Women of Literature" series continues with a look at Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (1569-1645), the first Englishwoman to publish a volume of poetry, the protofeminist Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) , which tells the...

What happens when an abnormally average man is suddenly on a path to greatness, as his picks in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament start panning out? Will he predict a perfect bracket, capturing the billion-dollar prize? An...

In 2025, Jacke began a countdown of the top 25 greatest books of all time, as part of a series called "25 for 25." In this episode, Jacke reveals the #2 and #1 entries on the list. Then Mike Palindrome, longtime friend and Pr...

Nineteenth-century art critic and polymath John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a visionary thinker and influential social commentator who revolutionized how society viewed art and its connection to life. In this episode, Jacke talks ...

In his book Why Poetry , the poet Matthew Zapruder issued "an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for its accessibility to all readers." The poet Robert Hass said, "Zapruder on poetry is p...

A member of the Cherokee nation, John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867) lived a dramatic life full of contradictions. He also became the first Native American to publish a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: the Celebra...

Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, book critic, and attorney. In this episode, Jacke talks to Daniel about his lifelong devotion to literature and its ability to human...

In the fourth century B.C., Plato famously posited a philosopher-king as the ideal ruler for his imagined Republic. Five hundred years later, the Roman Empire was led by Marcus Aurelius, the man often viewed as the best examp...

The world has a northern bias: our politics, culture, and literature all tend to view the northern viewpoint as the default position, leaving the far southern latitudes (Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Southern Africa ...

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. In this episode, Jacke talks to Dr. Zoë McGee about her new book Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines in the ...

"And one man in his time plays many parts," wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It , "[h]is acts being seven ages." We all know the feeling of passing from one phase to the next. But what happens when something dramatic mashes t...

In an 1886 letter to his brother, Anton Chekhov delivered some advice about truthfulness in writing. "Don't invent sufferings you have not experienced," he wrote, "and don't paint pictures you have not seen--for a lie in a st...

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His plain, economical prose style--inspired by journalism and the King James Bible, with an assist from the Cezannes he viewed...

For thousands of years, writers from ancient China to contemporary meme-makers have demonstrated the power of the short, witty, philosophical phrases known as aphorisms. In this episode, Jacke talks to James Geary ( The World...

Jacke kicks off the episode with an analysis of T.S. Eliot's underappreciated poem of urban alienation, "Preludes." Then scholar and translator Kate Deimling ( The Story of the Marquis de Cressy by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni ) te...