Smaller Narratives for a Larger World is a public humanities and social sciences podcast hosted by Cole Depuy. It is a new, interdisciplinary iteration of the radio show project Broadcasting World Literature, which ran on Harpur Radio Workshop (WHRW) between 2018-2020 and was sponsored by the Binghamton University Comparative Literature Department.
Smaller Narratives features a variety of guests from academics and activists to creatives and practitioners. This series of the podcast, which will run in its current form through the end of May 2022, investigates how the human story, the myths of humanity, have shaped who we believe we are as a species. Through different academic lenses, we explore solutions to today’s problems by seeking to understand how the stories we tell about each other may create the very social problems we seek to solve.
This project is sponsored by a Public Humanities grant from the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and a seed grant from the Material and Visual World TAE at Binghamton University. It is overseen by the faculty members Giovanna Montenegro (Comparative Literature), Jeroen Gerrits (Comparative Literature), Lubna Omar (Anthropology), and Joshua Reno (Anthropology).
More about our faculty supervisors:
Giovanna Montenegro, PhD is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Binghamton University who started out her career as a visual artist. Her research interests focus on Colonial Latin America & Early Modern Europe (with a focus on the Germanophone realm) and include interdisciplinary work on cartography, literature, and historical archives. Additionally, she is committed to public-facing digital humanities work and providing training opportunities for students interested in creating such work.
Jeroen Gerrits is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at in the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. His teaching and research center on intersections between film, new media, literature and philosophy, with a special interest in the ethical turn. He published a monograph Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns with SUNY Press (2019) as well as series of articles and book chapters on film-philosophy, TV-series, and the theory of adaptation.
Lubna Omar is a zooarchaeologist in the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University whose research and teaching interests broadly focus on the archaeology of human and animal relations, including complex societies in the Near East and the emergence of Urban economies and subsistence resources in prehistoric and historical settlements. She carried out fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Japan. Still, her primary research focus is on northern Mesopotamia, aiming to reconstruct the socio-economic patterns of urban centers using the animal’s analysis and illustrate the development of urbanism in the region during the Bronze Age and later periods. She is currently expanding her skills by incorporating digital archiving and storytelling to document Syrian archaeologists’ experiences as a tool to preserve endangered cultural heritage in Southwestern Asia.
Joshua Reno is a Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York State. He completed his PhD research as a landfill laborer at a transnational dump in Michigan, in 2008, focusing on the socio-economic conditions that makes Northern America so reliant on landfilling, as well as the cultural reality and political conflicts this leads to. He has published two books–Waste Away (2016) and Military Waste (2019), edited another book–Economies of Recycling (2012)–and written many other articles and book chapters on the
subject of waste, whether municipal, militaristic, or mammalian. More recently, he has been writing about a wider array of subjects, from disability to white supremacy and feminist anthropology.