Shayne Legassie talks about Medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and...

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 1970s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers...

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose posthumous reputation has changed many times since his disappearance 170 years ago. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and...

Annette Joseph Gabrielle talks with Bianca Williams about African American women who travel to Jamaica as tourists looking for happiness, intimacy, and new identities free from the limits of American racism. Joseph-Gabrielle is an assistant professor...

Richard Read talks about the troubled life of the Coast Guard's sole heavy icebreaker, Polar Star. Read is the Bureau Chief of the Los Angeles Times in Seattle. He is the winner of two Pulitzer prizes for his investigations on the Asian...

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut Avery Point. She is the author of Vast Expanses:...

Elizabeth Leane talks about Sidney Jeffryes, radio operator for Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1913. Jeffryes’ struggle with mental illness challenged Mawson’s expedition party as well as the way Mawson tried to present...

Artist Chiadikobi Nwaubani talks about his efforts to find, restore, and publish photographs from the colonial archives of West Africa. He also talks about his work re-interpreting these photographs using art and photo-manipulation.

Andrea Wulf’s book the The Invention of Nature tells the story of Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world’s most important nineteenth-century explorers. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra talks about some of the problems of the book,...

Matthew James talks about the 1905 Galapagos Expedition organized by the California Academy of Sciences. James is a professor of geology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that...

Jordan Bimm talks about early experiments in space medicine involving subjects who did not resemble the white male test pilots who would become America's first astronauts. Bimm is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. He’s the...

Andrew Denning talks about the Nazi cult of mobility, a set of ideas and practices that were crucial to its racist ideology. Denning is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is the author the...

Annette Joseph-Gabriel speaks to Jessica Nabongo about her quest to be the first black woman to travel to all of the countries of the world. Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan,...

Journalist Carl Hoffman talks about Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two men who arrived in Borneo with very different dreams and aspirations. Hoffman served as a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired Magazine. He is the...

Dr. Beth Taylor talks about the physiological differences between men and women athletes and why ultra-endurance events seem to offer certain performance advantages to women. Taylor is an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of...

Lucianne Walkowicz talks about the ethics of colonizing Mars and new developments in the search for extraterrestrial life. Walkowicz held the 2017 NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. She is currently an astronomer at the Adler...

Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar eclipse of 1919. Kennefick is an associate professor of...

Emily Kern talks about the search for human origins in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically why anthropologists came to see Africa – rather than Asia – as the cradle of the human species. Kern is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in New Earth...

Director Robert Stone talks about his film Chasing the Moon, a three-part documentary which aired on PBS’s American Experience for the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.

Margaret Schotte talks about how sailors were trained to do the difficult and dangerous work of navigation in the early modern world. Schotte is an Assistant Professor of History at York University. She is the author of Sailing School:...

Ed Armston-Sheret talks about the mysterious disease of scurvy: how it affected expeditioners and why it was so difficult to understand. Armston-Sheret is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway University of London. He’s the author of "Tainted bodies :...

Dani Inkpen talks about expedition life in the Juneau Icefield, home to some of the most spectacular glaciers in North America. In the 1940s, it was the place where science and mountaineering joined hands and, occasionally, came into conflict. Inkpen...

Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space. She is also the author of two books, Breaking the Chains...

Russell Potter discusses new developments in the search for answers about the tragic Franklin Expedition that disappeared in the Arctic in 1845. Potter is a professor of English and Media Studies at Rhode Island College. He's the author...

Jake Robins and Michael Robinson talk about the quest to explore Mars: how it compares to earlier eras of exploration in the West and in the Arctic as well as its power to capture the imagination of thousands of people. Robins is the host of...