Severance Radio: A Nevada Reads Book Club

Black Mountain Radio & Nevada Humanities
  • 4.8 (20)
  • BOOKS
  • SERIES

Severance Radio is an on-air book club dissecting Ling Ma’s satirical, dystopian novel "Severance." The novel is a moving family story that explores loneliness, corporate monotony, and survival in the midst of a global health crisis. Produced by Nevada Humanities and The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. New episodes every Thursday starting August 13.

  1. EPISODE 1

    Introducing Severance Radio

    Severance Radio is an on-air book club dissecting Ling Ma’s satirical, dystopian novel Severance. The novel is a moving family story that explores loneliness, corporate monotony, and survival in the midst of a global health crisis.   Severance Radio: A Nevada Reads Book Club is jointly produced by Nevada Humanities and the Black Mountain Institute, and is part of Nevada Reads, a statewide program of Nevada Humanities. This program is made possible with the support of Nevada Humanities, Black Mountain Institute, Nevada State Library, Archives and Public Records, The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Nevada Center for the Book. The Nevada Center for the Book is a program of Nevada Humanities and is the state affiliate of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.

    1 min

  2. EPISODE 2

    The Beginning of Severance Radio

    For 14 weeks, Severance Radio will dissect a single book: Severance, the satirical, dystopian novel by Ling Ma. This book is a mixture of immigrant family story, corporate satire, and global health crisis. In this episode, producers Stephanie Gibson, Kathleen Kuo, and Sara Ortiz discuss how Severance Radio came to be, and how we relate to each other during a pandemic.

    14 min

  3. EPISODE 3

    Tracing the History of Zombies

    In this episode, two scholars of English literature, Katherine Fusco and Stephen Pasqualina, investigate one of the most unsettling signs of the apocalypse in popular culture: the rise of the undead. Join us for a conversation about the mythology of zombies and the zombie trope in Severance.  Katherine Fusco writes about the way different media forms shape identity and encourage us to be either cruel or kind to one another. After completing a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, she spent several years working as the assistant director of the Vanderbilt Writing Studio. Since arriving at the University of Nevada, Reno, she has been proud to have her teaching honored by the Crowley Distinguished Professorship in the Core Humanities. She teaches courses on film, theory, and 19th and 20th century American literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. Katherine also writes about pop-culture for a number of national outlets. Stephen Pasqualina is a postdoctoral fellow in the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. He completed his Ph.D. in the department of English at the University of Southern California. While working toward his Ph.D., he attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. His research focuses primarily on modernist literature and visual culture, transnational American studies, science and technology studies, critical race studies, and 20th century historiography and historical theory. His current research is focused on how Zora Neale Hurston's writing, film, and photography mediates the long history of colonial slavery. This work is part of a larger book project that examines the relationship between second-stage industrialization and the U.S. historical imaginary from 1880 to 1945. DISCUSSED Haitian zombie myth, French colonialism, slavery, The Serpent and the Rainbow (film) by Wade Davis, White Zombies (film) by Bela Lugosi, The Magic Island (book) by William Seabrook, 1915 - 1934 US occupation of Haiti, The Walking Dead, Tell My Horse (book) by Zora Neale Hurston, Night of the Living Dead & Dawn of the Dead (films) by George Romero, Get Out (film) by Jordan Peele, Dawn of the Dead (2004 film) by Zac Snyder

    19 min

  4. EPISODE 4

    Public Health Amid a Pandemic

    In this episode, Severance Radio host Heidi Kyser interviews two public health experts, Jennifer Carson and Marya Shegog, as they examine who is most vulnerable in a pandemic.  Jennifer Carson works to envision and develop opportunities for individual and collective growth to combat ageism and ableism, and improve the inclusion and well-being of elders, with a particular interest in persons living with dementia. Jennifer is Director of the Dementia Engagement, Education and Research (DEER) Program in the School of Community Health Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Jennifer also partners with the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine’s Sanford Center for Aging on a U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program grant. Her role is to provide comprehensive education for care partners of persons living with dementia and to conduct statewide outreach for the Improving Care of Elders through Community and Academic Partnerships (ICECAP Nevada) initiative, which includes interprofessional geriatrics and dementia care training for primary care providers, health professions students, long-term care professionals and family care partners. Marya Shegog joined The Lincy Institute in September 2012 as its Director of Health Programs. She has worked as a research scientist for several federal and corporate entities and as director of a unique after-school program for children and emerging adults in urban, low-income communities. An advocate for HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness in minority communities, she has increased capacity among community-based organizations throughout the U.S. to better meet local needs while respecting each organization’s mission and vision. In addition to UNLV, she has held faculty/teaching positions at Hampton University, the University of South Carolina, and Cincinnati State College. She is a frequent speaker and facilitator at conferences, forums, and classes where she helps cultivate cultural competency among health care professionals. Her teaching and research interests focus on effectively identifying and addressing health disparities in order to eradicate them, developing cultural competency in health care, and shaping healthy communities through policy, programming, planning, and evaluation. DISCUSSED Loneliness, homelessness, mental health, ableism, the dehumanization of the “fevered”, rituals, structural oppression in public health, working conditions, economy vs human lives

    12 min

  5. EPISODE 5

    The Construction of Otherness

    In this episode, two scholars Tim Gauthier and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan delve into the Us/Them paradigm that reveals itself throughout the story. How do we decide who is human, and who is not? What are the dangers of Othering in times of crisis?  Tim Gauthier is currently serving as Director of the Multidisciplinary Studies and Social Science Studies programs in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Ethnic, and Gender Studies at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). His research focuses on contemporary fiction and spans post-colonial concerns and artistic reactions to social and personal trauma experiences. He is the author of Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations – a study of A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie (Routledge, 2006), and 9/11 Fiction, Empathy and Otherness (Lexington Books, 2015). Additionally, he has published articles on Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. For the last three years he has taught a class entitled “Community and Immunity,” focusing on the discourse of contagion. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English and Vice Chair of the graduate interdisciplinary program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. She works at the intersections of South Asian Anglophone and Asian/American literatures and cultural production, and is currently completing a manuscript on the diasporic registration of the New India discourse. Srinivasan is also an award-winning journalist and former magazine editor with bylines in over three dozen scholarly and public venues. Her most recent (2018-2019) work can be found in ARIEL, Interventions, Comparative Literature Studies, GLQ, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, The New Yorker, boundary2online, Popula, Zócalo Public Square, Politics/Letters, and Public Books. Writing is forthcoming in journals including Feminist Formations, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, as well as the edited volumes The Critic as Amateur, Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women’s Writing, and the Handbook of Anglophone World Literature. Before joining UA, Ragini taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a PhD in 2016. She is Co-Chair of the Academic Council of the South Asian American Digital Archive.   DISCUSSED Residual humanity, well/sick binary, creatures of habit, “we”, identity/collective identity, complicity

    16 min

  6. EPISODE 6

    Dynamics of Race & Privilege Amid a Pandemic

    In this episode, a long-time Las Vegas community partner Dana Lee and experimental writer Vi Khi Nao discuss how a pandemic brings out familiar–and unsettling–ways of talking about race. Dana Lee has been a long-time Las Vegas community partner, supporting education, the arts, and social services. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Brown University and a Master of Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University.  Vi Khi Nao is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes drawings, poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. vikhinao.com   DISCUSSED Pandemic, desert animals, cancel culture, racism, Trump, otherness, American patriotism, George Floyd, misinformation spread online, Trader Joe’s, mistaken beliefs, flowers

    13 min

  7. EPISODE 7

    Decolonization and Dystopian Literature

    In this episode, Jenna Hanchey and Erica Vital-Lazare – two scholars who study language – talk about the new voices needed to imagine new worlds. Jenna Hanchey is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focuses on the neocolonialism of aid and volunteer work in Africa, and she is currently working on a project examining how Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist sci-fi imagines development in anti-colonial ways.  Erica Vital-Lazare is a writer and a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, where she teaches Marginalized Voices in Dystopian literature, and she is the editor of a forthcoming series revisiting classic Black works in literature titled Of the Diaspora with McSweeney’s Press. DISCUSSED Anticolonialism, “A Colonized Mind” (song) by Prince, Frantz Fanon (psychiatrist), oppression, colonialist structures, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (scholar/author), psychological effects of colonization, home, materialism, nostalgia, old systems, M Archive: After the End of the World (book) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Andrea Hairston (author), chaos, new worlds, Toni Morrison (author)

    24 min

  8. EPISODE 8

    Work and The Millennial Condition

    In this episode, two voices in academics and publishing, Karen Gu and Jean Munson, trace connections between Candace's experiences and the millennial struggles to break into an industry and survive in the workplace. Karen Gu is a writer whose fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Paper Darts, and The Margins. She is a Kundiman Fellow and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Jean Marie Munson is founder of local comics company Plot Twist Publishing. She is an alum of UNLV in 2009 and has spent the last decade after graduating in activism, art, and teaching. Her primary role on campus is being the Women's Research Institute of Nevada's Program Manager running the National Education for Women's Leadership Nevada Program that was piloted from Rutgers. She is passionate about being a resource and supporter of all levels leadership in student activism. DISCUSSED The Asian American experience, doubt, parents, publishing, arts, capitalism, blogging, content creation, struggling, cringe-worthy moments, consumer culture, work culture, guilt, routines

    17 min
See All (14)

Trailer

4.8
out of 5
20 Ratings

About

Severance Radio is an on-air book club dissecting Ling Ma’s satirical, dystopian novel "Severance." The novel is a moving family story that explores loneliness, corporate monotony, and survival in the midst of a global health crisis. Produced by Nevada Humanities and The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. New episodes every Thursday starting August 13.

Information

  • Creator
    Black Mountain Radio & Nevada Humanities
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Black Mountain Radio & Nevada Humanities