The Duck of Minerva

ymena Kurowska of Central European University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kurowska grew up in the northern part of Poland, at a time of world and local transition. She discusses what it was like to move around to 'closed' cities in a military family, having a father who served in the Polish military and also in a UN peacekeeping operation in Southern Lebanon. Xymena recalls how a karate injury almost kept her out of going to a university, and how she came to study International Relations. She reflects on what Warsaw was like in the late 1990s, getting her...

Professor Tarak Barkawi joins Brent this week. He discusses growing up in Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s, in a very politically aware family, and his varied interests in military history but also LA’s punk rock scene, having a school that doubled as a fallout shelter and his first encounters with eye-opening racial violence. He talks about his decision to go to George Washington University, getting his master’s at the LSE, his brief overlap with John Vincent before the latter died, the influence of Bud Duvall at Minnesota, his work with Mark Laffey, going on the market, getting jobs at...

Professor Harman joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. She starts off discussing with Brent her childhood and growing up on a farm in Buckinghamshire in SE England, her interests and aspirations during that time and the family dynamics regarding politics and who was expected to take over the farm each generation. She had a gap year, then went to Manchester for undergrad and graduate training, got into global public health, political economy, and traveled to Tanzania, and then as she tells it was able to get a job in London at City University after approaching some folks from there when they...

Professor Rebecca Adler-Nissen joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Adler-Nissen is a proflic scholar known for her work on diplomacy, integration, practice theory, and her deep knowledge and use of social theory. She talks to Brent about growing up in Denmark, but also Israel and the United States. Before going to uni, Rebecca spent some time working on boats, sailing at one point to the Canary Islands where she looked for more work at the age of 18. She eventually returned to Europe, attending both the University of Copenhagen and Sciences Po. Rebecca went to Copenhagen as well for...

In this episode, Dr. Toni Haastrup of the University of Stirling joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Haastrup was born in Aberdeen, but moved  to Nigeria when she was very young. She talks about primary and then secondary school there, the decisions she had to make early on about language training in the schools, and then her family’s move to California during the last part of high school. She discusses going to Las Positas in California, and then UC Davis, where she pursued a degree in IR, with a minor in Political Science, and her decision to go to University of Cape Town in South...

Professor Francois Debrix of Virginia Tech University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Francois grew up in France, attending college there with degrees in Spanish and English, and then International Law, Political Science and Diplomatic History. An exchange program through the University of Strasbourg brought Francois to the US and Purdue, where he pursued his Master's, and then PhD under the supervision of Cynthia Weber. Professor Debrix talks about his interest in ideology that led to his dissertation and first book, Re-envisioning Peacekeeping. That book in part helped land him the...

Professor Timothy Longman of Boston University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. He speaks about his decision, eventually, to focus on Rwanda as the basis for his dissertation.

Tony Lang discusses philosophy, writing, and why the International Ethics section of the ISA developed into such a friendly environment for junior scholars.