The Academic Life

Since the arrival of Columbus, thousands of perpetrators have gotten away with murder, burying evidence of their crimes in police reports and court testimony. How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit People in the Americas (Beacon, 2026) unearths that hidden evidence to expose the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people (MMIW2S).

Historian and citizen of Cherokee Nation Liza Black examines five cases in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, from 1908 to 2017. Rejecting narratives that blame victims’ poverty or trauma, Dr. Black dissects police files, coroners’ reports, and court records to uncover a harsh historical reality: The evidence of settler violence has been hiding in plain sight.

This landmark work delivers a damning verdict: The same systems of law and policing that have targeted Native people for centuries have also shielded their killers. Through meticulous archival interrogation, Dr. Black demonstrates how police, courts, and coroners have functioned not as instruments of justice but as pillars of a system designed to protect settler violence.
Guest: Dr. Liza Black is a historian who employs forensic archival methods within 19th and 20th century North America. As a 2024–25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, she excavated institutional and state-sanctioned archives to trace asymmetrical sovereignty. Her research there resulted in How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit People in the Americas (Beacon, 2026).
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an experienced writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore the stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Playlist for listeners:
Whiskey Tender
A Calm and Normal Heart
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Night of the Living Rez
The Diné Reader
Living Resistance
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. 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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Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton UP, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.
Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Playlist for listeners:
Talking To Strangers
Making A Meaningful Life
How to Human
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
More Than A Glitch
Meditation and the Academic Life
Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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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

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