Too often, Dr. Pauline Chen argues, the focus on keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping those who are approaching death. Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon -- the subject of her book Final Exam: A...

Patrick Anthony discusses the Prussian naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, the world's most famous explorer in the early 1800s. Famed and admired for his 1799 expedition to South and Central America, Humboldt has been rediscovered by a...

Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature. Horrocks in an associate professor in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Wellington,...

Martin Thomas discusses the 1948 Arnhem Land expedition and the controversy that surrounds it. His new documentary, Etched in Bone, which he co-directed with Beatrice Bijon, traces the events of the expedition and its effects upon the aboriginal...

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. Sponsel’s close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution....

Dr. Joy McCann discusses the great circumpolar ocean that surrounds Antarctica.  She is a historian at the Centre for Environmental History at Australian National University and the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean.

Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primatologists in the years after World War II. Milam is a professor of history at Princeton University. She...

Dr. Beth Taylor discusses the science and psychology of running. Taylor is an Associate Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Connecticut. She also serves as the Director of Exercise Physiology Research at Hartford Hospital. 

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks with Tiffany Gill about the history of African American travel in the late twentieth century and its importance to black communities across the lines of class and gender. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French...

In 1845, the two British naval ships left England with 129 men in search of the Northwest Passage. They were never heard from again. Professor Russell Potter talks about the expedition and the reasons why it continues to fascinate people around the...

Dr. Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme...

Sean Cocco talks about the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius and its impact on Renaissance science and culture. Cocco is an associate professor of history at Trinity College. He is the author of Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in...

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...

Cole Kelleher talks about his work for the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, an agency that uses satellite data to make cutting-edge maps for the support of polar scientists in the field. 

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...

Scott Wallace talks about his 2002 expedition into Amazon to find the Arrow People, one of the world's last uncontacted tribes. Wallace is a  professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, a contributor to National Geographic, and a...

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...

Hal Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young René Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as studying philosophy. Cook is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of...

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...

Anthropologist John Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology: the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological...

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:...

Doctoral candidate Sarah Pickman talks about studying exploration for her Ph.D exams: specifically what it's like to read three hundred books and articles and then discuss them in front of a committee of professors.

Sarah Pickman talks about the literature of exploration. She offers some picks for categories of exploration books not commonly seen in indexes and bibliographies.

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.

Dr. Angelina Callahan talks about the Naval Research Laboratory's Project Vanguard. While this satellite mission was part of the Cold War "Space Race," it also represented something more: a scientific platform for understanding the space environment...