Conversations: Hosted by NYU President Andy Hamilton
New York University
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In these conversations, President Andy Hamilton interviews NYU faculty, students, and alumni who are using their intellectual gifts, determination, and creativity to make a profound difference in our world. With each guest, he pulls back the curtain to learn the origins of their inspiration, the current focus of their work, and their vision for the future.
Available episodes
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Mar 1, 2023
13: Coach Kim Wyant
Kim Wyant, head coach of the NYU men's soccer team, is a groundbreaking athlete and coach. When she was appointed to this role in 2015, she was the only woman coaching an NCAA men's soccer team. In fall 2022, she gained wide publicity for a historic matchup against Julianne Sitch—the new coach for the UChicago men's team. The two teams played to a draw, and Chicago went on to win the NCAA Div III national championship.
In addition to her years of success as a coach for numerous teams, Wyant was also a highly accomplished player. She was a starter for the University of Central Florida in the first-ever NCAA Women's National Championship Game (1982), and was named MVP of that tournament. She was named first team All-American as a college senior.
Wyant played goalkeeper for the first United States Women's National Team in their inaugural international game against Italy in 1985. In 2008, Wyant received the Special Recognition Award from the National Soccer Hall of Fame for her contributions to the National Team.
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Dec 20, 2022
12: Molly Shannon
Molly Shannon (NYU Tisch '87) is an actress and comedian who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2001. Her recent television roles include Enlightened (2013), Divorce (2016-19), The White Lotus (2021), and I Love That For You (2022). Her voice can be heard in the animated films Igor (2008) and the Hotel Transylvania film series (2012–2022). In 2017, she won the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Other People. Her best-selling memoir, Hello, Molly!, was published in April 2022. Shannon is renowned for comedy that is both fearless and empathetic.
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May 16, 2022
11: Professor David Holland
David Holland is a renowned climate scientist who recently returned from the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. He works in close partnership with his wife, Denise Holland, who is his manager of field and logistics.
Fascinated by the Arctic since his childhood in Newfoundland and Labrador, he discusses what we know—and don’t yet know—about the warming of the oceans and its threat to humankind; his shuttling between teaching and research in urban centers and intensive fieldwork in some of the most beautiful and dangerous regions of the world; and the politicization of climate science as vast changes become more of a reality.
Holland is an esteemed global scientist—recently made a fellow of the American Geophysical Union—who has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in the field of polar environmental science. At NYU, he is professor of mathematics and atmosphere/ocean science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; director of the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New York City; and director of the Center for Sea Level Change at NYU Abu Dhabi.
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Feb 1, 2022
10: Professor Deb Willis
Deb Willis is an artist, photographer, author, and educator, and she is one of the nation's leading historians and curators of African American photography. At NYU, she is a University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Willis is widely published; her most recent book is The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2021).
In addition to making art, writing, and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and educational centers. She has also appeared and consulted on media projects, including documentary films such as Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People; Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project, which received the ICP Infinity Award 2015; and American Photography, a PBS Documentary.
Since 2006, she has co-organized thematic conferences exploring “Black Portraitures,” focusing on imaging the Black body. She holds honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She is currently researching two projects, on photography and the Black Arts Movement, and artists reimaging history.
In the reckoning with the still-pervasive racism within America, Willis’s work confronts and upends our comprehension of the past and expands our capacity to understand the current moment.
She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Are the Arts Essential?, an anthology of major American artists, scholars, and funders who contemplate this question, based on a multiyear series of symposia convened by the Brademas Center (NYU Press, February 2022).
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Nov 22, 2021
09: Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash has spent her career as a musician and author telling stories—from the Mississippi Delta, from her family’s roots in the 19th century, and from her own American experience. Now she brings that spirit to NYU students to "explore and spread the word about the roots music that informs so much of what I do and who I am.”
A four-time Grammy winner and immensely successful crossover artist in country, pop, and Americana, she moved from Nashville to New York City in 1991 and considers it home. She continues to compose, record, and perform extensively, as well as to write memoir, fiction, and essays.
Cash joined the NYU Steinhardt School as the 2021-22 Americana Artist-in-Residence—the first artist’s residency developed in partnership with the Americana Music Association Foundation. She will present, curate, and moderate a variety of lectures, discussions, workshops, performances, and classroom visits throughout the 2021-22 academic year, including a three-day Lyric Workshop, in which a handful of NYU Steinhardt songwriting students will develop and workshop original material under her guidance.
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May 10, 2021
08: Professor Deborah Archer
Deborah N. Archer is the Jacob K. Javits Professor at NYU and Professor of Clinical Law at the NYU School of Law. She also directs the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, and the Civil Rights Clinic at the NYU School of Law. Archer is a nationally recognized expert in civil rights, civil liberties, and racial justice.
In January 2021, she was elected national board president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the first Black person to hold the position in the ACLU’s 101-year history.
Before the board presidency of the ACLU, Archer was a member of the ACLU’s executive committee and served as general counsel to the board. She is a former chair of the American Association of Law Schools’ Section on Civil Rights and Section on Minority Groups. For many years, she served on the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the body that investigates police misconduct. She was also a member of the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, employment discrimination, and school desegregation.
President Hamilton speaks with Professor Archer about her career as a civil rights attorney and scholar, her projects at NYU , her new role at the ACLU, and her view of the next steps—legal and cultural—toward the dismantling of racism within American institutions and society.
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Mar 22, 2021
07: Dr. Céline Gounder
Dr. Céline Gounder, is a clinical assistant professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and a practicing HIV/infectious diseases specialist.
Dr. Gounder, who has written for numerous publications, is a CNN medical analyst and frequent expert guest on CNN, the BBC, and other networks. She is also the host and producer of American Diagnosis, a podcast on health and social justice, and Epidemic, a podcast about the COVID-19 pandemic.
In early 2015, she spent two months volunteering as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea, and interviews she conducted there became the basis of Dying to Talk, a feature-length documentary she made about the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in that country.
Dr. Gounder served on President Biden's and Vice President Harris's Transition Covid-19 Advisory Board from November 9, 2020 through January 20, 2021, and it is our honor to welcome her to today’s show.
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Feb 19, 2021
06:Bob Bauer
NYU Law School professor Bob Bauer served as White House counsel under Barack Obama and as senior advisor to Joe Biden on his 2020 campaign. He has written extensively on a range of topics including the rule of law, election safeguards, national security, and the power of the presidency.
In the early days of President Biden's new administration, President Hamilton talks to Bauer about how the US can and should move forward after a period of fracture perhaps unlike any seen since the Civil War.
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Dec 17, 2019
05 - SeaStraws
Founder and CEO Antonio Di Meglio (Stern ’20) and Co-founder and Creative Director Echo Chen (Gallatin ’20) are current NYU undergrads who established SeaStraws in 2018 with Sophie Kennedy (CAS ’19) and several other NYU students.
SeaStraws provides nationwide distributors and individual restaurants with disposable single-use products that minimize environmental impact. The company’s mission is to transform hospitality through sustainable alternatives.
In September 2018, the University announced several sustainability initiatives, including its commitment to eliminate plastic straws in the dining halls—resulting in 1,140,000 fewer plastic straws in the waste stream annually. The SeaStraws team contacted the Office of Student Affairs to offer their products to NYU's dining services, and one month later, SeaStraws became the official straws supplier for all of NYU’s dining halls. The business relationship continues to this day. As of September 2019, SeaStraws has sold over 4.5 million paper straws, preventing the use of over 4,700 pounds of plastic.
Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.
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Sep 27, 2019
04 - Timothy Naftali
Tim Naftali is NYU's clinical associate professor of history and clinical associate professor of public service, and director of NYU's undergraduate public policy major. He was the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of presidential documents and nearly 700 hours of Nixon tapes.
Naftali is a regular CNN contributor, offering expertise in national security and intelligence policy, international history, and presidential history. As a TV commentator, he has appeared on more than 30 shows and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has served as a historical consultant on television programs such as ABC’s Designated Survivor, and is the author of numerous books, including One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1998) and Impeachment: An American History (2018).
Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.
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May 22, 2019
03 - Marion Nestle
Marion Nestle, NYU’s Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, founded the nation’s first academic food studies program at Steinhardt in 1988, helping to forge an interdisciplinary field that looks at food as a complex social and political issue. As a research-based scientist with a PhD in molecular biology, she has examined the role of food marketing on food choice, obesity, and food safety, and emerged as an eminent public voice in challenging the food industry’s claims about the nutritional value of its products.
The author of nine books—most recently Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat— Nestle received the James Beard Leadership Award in 2013 and was named the #2 most influential foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) by Michael Pollan in 2011
Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.
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Apr 15, 2019
02 - Anthony Appiah
Anthony Appiah, NYU professor of philosophy and law, was named in Forbes magazine in 2009 as one of the “world’s seven most powerful thinkers” by then-Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman.
Appiah’s pioneering philosophy on identity and our individual role in the global community have gained acclaim through his numerous books—including 2007’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, which former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called an “appeal for mutual respect and understanding” that he hoped would be heard “far and wide.” Many will surely know him, quite simply, as “The Ethicist”—which is the title of the weekly New York Times Magazine column in which he answers questions posed by readers facing moral dilemmas. Appiah was born in London, where his parents, Joseph (who would become a member of Ghana’s parliament, an ambassador, and president of the Ghana Bar Association) and Peggy Cripps (a novelist, art collector, scholar, and childre…
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Feb 22, 2019
01 - Ruben Blades
Rubén Blades is one of the most successful artists in the history of Latin music. His Afro-Cuban albums touched with rock, jazz, pan-Latin, and other influences have won 17 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards. As an actor, he has starred in the AMC television series Fear the Walking Dead, and has worked with directors including Robert Redford, Spike Lee, and Ridley Scott.
Away from the arts, Blades is equally active, holding degrees in political science and law from the University of Panama, and an LLM from Harvard Graduate Law School. In 1994, he ran for president of the Republic of Panama, coming in third place, and later served as Panama’s minister of tourism from 2004–2009. Blades has been a UN World Ambassador Against Racism, and was recipient of ASCAP's Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award.
Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.
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