Genealogies of Modernity Podcast

FAIN: TR-278031-21

Beatrice Institute (Pittsburgh, PA 15222-6012)
Ryan McDermott (Project Director: August 2020 to present)

Production of a podcast series on the meaning and origins of modernity, as well as supplementary components including a website, colloquia, and animated videos. 

The Genealogies of Modernity Podcast aims to show how certain understandings of what modernity is and how it came about have serious implications for the world we inhabit. The podcast will bring to life academic debates over the meaning and origins of modernity in vivid stories from ancient, medieval, early modern, and recent history. Each episode focuses on a set of “modernity moments”--passages in history thought to inaugurate a new age. In telling the stories of these modernity moments through the perspectives of multiple humanities disciplines, each episode explores how the humanities shape common and lesser known conceptions of what it means to be modern. This podcast draws on five humanities disciplines in order to recognize, evaluate, and learn from the narratives of modernity that explicitly or implicitly shape the ways we understand the present: history; literary and media studies; art history; philosophy; theology and religious studies.