The Academic Life

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary and eight slaves, including Ona Judge, about whom little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.

Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, the few pleasantries she was afforded were nothing compared to freedom, a glimpse of which she encountered first-hand in Philadelphia. So, when the opportunity presented itself, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

With impeccable research, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked it all to gain freedom from the famous founding father in In Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Simon and Schuster, 2017).
Guest: Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar holds a B.A. in History and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her area of expertise centers the lives of eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women who lived in what would become the United States of America. Her work focuses on the history of slavery and freedom, social history, urban history, and women’s history. While Dr. Dunbar is committed to the production of scholarly literature, she is deeply invested in more public facing work—scholarship that reaches large general audiences through television, film, radio, and podcasts.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler a developmental editor and writing coach for academics. She produces the Academic Life podcast and newsletter.
Playlist:
Running From Bondage
The Social Constructions of Race
We Refuse
I Have Avenged America
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
This episode was originally published on 12/16/2020

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To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.
Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Sara Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.
Guest: Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar. She has published eleven books, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter.
Playlist for listeners:
How We Show Up
Indigenous D.C.
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
What Might Be
Living Resistance
Leading Toward Liberation
Leading From The Margins
Thanks To Life
I Have Avenged America
Black Boy Out Of Time
Shoutin In The Fire
The Names Of All the Flowers
Hands Up, Don't Shoot
That Librarian
Book Banning
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Feeling worn out by the work of resistance? How do you persevere?
Today’s book is: Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, by Kaitlin B. Curtice. In an era in which "resistance" has become tokenized, Kaitlin Curtice reclaims it as a basic human calling. Kaitlin Curtice shows that we can learn to practice embodied ways of belonging and connection to ourselves and one another through everyday practices, such as getting more in touch with our bodies, resting, and remembering our ancestors. She explores four "realms of resistance"—the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral—and shows how these realms overlap and why all are needed for our liberation. Readers will be empowered to seek wholeness in whatever spheres of influence they inhabit.
Guest: Kaitlin B. Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, she writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She writes online for On Being, SELF Magazine, and more. Her work has been featured on CBS and in USA Today. Her books include Native, Living Resistance, and Everything Is A Story. She writes The Liminality Journal.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter.
Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
How We Show Up
Indigenous D.C.
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
What Might Be
The Diné Reader
Night of the Living Rez
A Calm and Normal Heart
Becoming the Writer You Already Are
The Lost Journal of Sacajewea
How can mindfulness help?
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
This episode was originally published on May 11, 2023

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When American fascists suddenly goose-stepped down Main Street in the 1930s, fascism was seen by the rest of the country as a terrifying and radical new European import. It was not. It didn’t come from abroad. Nor was it new or radical. The seed of American fascism was planted by elite southern planters who insisted that slavery need not be addressed in the Constitution because it would soon die out on its own.
In The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 (Bloomsbury, 2026), Joseph Kelly chronicles fascism’s deep roots in the antebellum South; its codification under Jim Crow; and, then, after the Spanish American War, its ascendency in the form of Anglo-Saxon nationalism, proposing that the nation belongs to a master-race-the original lie of American fascism. Dr. Kelly’s gripping book reminds us that the monied elite have always exceled at deploying disinformation to bias and inflame the masses, and that there have always been courageous patriots helping us to fight our way out of darkness toward the light.
Guest: Dr. Kelly is a professor of literature and history at the college of Charleston. He is the author of Marooned, The Biggest Lie, and America’s Longest Siege.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter. She works as a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.
Listeners may also be interested in:
Paper Heroines
No Common Ground
Thy Will Be Done
Preparing for War
Understanding Disinformation
Campus Monuments
What Might Be
The Social Constructions of Race
Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom
Belonging
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.
Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school—and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Dr, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront—from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities—go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work.
Dr. Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success.
Guest: Dr. Sally A. Nuamah is an associate professor of Urban Politics in Human Development, Social Policy and Political Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. She has received numerous awards; began the TWII Foundation to provide funding for girls striving to be first in their families to go to college; and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a Women and Public Policy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Host is: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the both Academic Life podcast and the show’s weekly newsletter. She is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.
Listeners may be interested in:
Teacher By Teacher
Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change
Black Girls and How We Fail Them
Leading from the Margins
How We Show Up
How Schools Make Race
Black Woman On Board
Remembering Lucille
Can I Say That?
Teaching About Race And Racism
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
This episode was originally published Nov 6, 2020

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.