Love & Its Discontents Adnan Mahmutovic

Join me for a deep conversation on love in times and aftermath of traumatic historical events. How do our history and heritage make us and how do they shape the way we love? Focusing on the unique work of poetic theater, A Short History of Anger, about the genocide in Smyrna and the massive movements of peoples across borders of modern Turkey and Greece, we dig into things that help us live meaningful lives, overcome traumas and define love in ways that are healing.
Joy Manesiotis is the author of three collections of poems, A Short History of Anger, which won The New Measure Poetry Prize, Revoke, and They Sing to Her Bones, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize.
Currently, she is staging A Short History of Anger: A Hybrid Work of Poetry & Theatre at international festivals and universities in the U.S. and Europe.
Poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Poetry International, as well as in translation.
Previously the Edith R. White Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, she teaches in the MFA in Writing program at OSU/Cascades and serves on the editorial board of Airlie Press.

Join me in this unique conversation on love spells and potions with Dr. Amila Buturovic.
Buturovic was born in Sarajevo. She works at the Dept of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University. Her interest lies in the cultural history of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans, specifically Bosnia. Her major works are Stone Speaker: Bosnian Tombstones, Landscape and Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (2002), Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Tombstones and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam (2016). She is a co-editor with Irvin Schick of Women in the Ottoman Balkans (2008).
Her most recent project focuses on the culture of health and healing in Ottoman Bosnia, especially in relation to esoteric teachings and occult practices. As part of this project, she has teamed up with the National Museum of BiH to research and help curate their collection of artifacts that speak to the rich and interconfessional heritage of magic and healing in Ottoman Bosnia.
Follow Buturovic at https://twitter.com/amila295

In this episode, we delve into the amazing worlds of the African-American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. We go in-depth on her masterpiece Beloved but also trace the theme of love throughout her oeuvre.
Alice Sundman is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English, at Stockholm University. Her book Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022) explores the creation and presentation of Toni Morrison’s literary places. Her research interests include Toni Morrison, ecocriticism, place and space studies, genetic criticism, phenomenology, and the intersections between literature and philosophy.

Join me for a truly unique and rewarding conversation with Professor Mieke Bal about one of the most captivating stories of all time, the story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of more than 40 books, many films, and video installations. Her work is often course literature in a wide range of disciplines. Her "Narratology# is a must for all students of narrative.

Conversation with Mohsin Hamid the globally loved author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Exit West, and many more novels.

In this special episode, I interview my old teacher and mentor Ishrat Lindblad, an expert on Shakespearean drama. But we also get personal on the way love shaped us.