Tiny Spaces, Big Ideas
An HFA YouTube Series
About
Inspired by NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, Tiny Spaces, Big Ideas is a YouTube series designed to make scholarly conversations feel accessible, engaging, and a little bit unexpected.
Each episode will feature a guest lecturer from across the college, who will be given only seven minutes to present. The format is structured in three parts: First, the speaker introduces a specific topic or challenge within their field. Then, they offer a new way of thinking about that challenge. Finally, they share a second, alternative approach, essentially giving listeners multiple lenses through which to view a complex issue.
Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish
Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay (History, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies) explains some of the effects of the Holocaust on the Yiddish language.
Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death
Professor Jessica Barr (Comparative Literature) talks about medieval women’s writings about life and death.
Plain Plaster Tells the Story of Ancient Master Craftspeople
Professor Shannon Hogue (Classics) explains what plaster fragments tell us about the people who helped build the Palace of Nestor in Greece.
Episodes
All lectures in the video series.
Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish
Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay (History, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies) explains some of the effects of the Holocaust on the Yiddish language.
Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death
Professor Jessica Barr explains how medieval women’s religious writings show us how their complex experiences of life and death differ from what men wrote about them—and can help us navigate our own mortality, too.
Plain Plaster Tells the Story of Ancient Master Craftspeople
Professor Hogue explains how small pieces of plaster floor can reveal the workmanship of the craftspeople who helped build the Bronze Age Palace of Nestor in Greece over 3,000 years ago.
A Thousand Tiny Decisions on Music's Journey Towards AI
Music's thousand-year journey from an ephemeral, body-bound art form to AI-ready data required converting memory, performance, and creativity into discrete, storable objects—each step made for good reasons, but each removing a human element from the art.
In Search of Our Mothers Voices: An Auto-Ethnography on Garifuna Women’s Feminist Praxis
In the South Bronx, three generations of Garifuna New Yorkers continue to uphold the maternal network cultivated by Garifuna migrants. By exploring conversations with her mother and aunts, Professor Daisy E. Guzman Nunez (W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies) is constructing an intimate archive of race, gender, and migration through the lived experience of first-generation Garifuna-Guatemalan migrants in this Garifuna hub.
Tarnished Promises: Indian Peace Medals in North America
Professor Samuel Redman (History) examines the complex legacy of Indian Peace Medals.
Death in Black Men's Literary Imaginations
Professor Jimmy Worthy II from the English department examines the omnipresence of death in African-American male experience and literature.
Mapping Word Meanings with AI
Professor Katrin Erk of both the Linguistics and Computer Science departments talks about using AI to create maps of word meanings.
Bringing Big Ideas Into Focus
Dean Davidson speaks about what inspired HFA's new YouTube series.
Contact
Emma DeFelice
Andee Browne-Tatro
