Podcast Intellectuals Panel #3 with Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Aurora Hutchinson

Mar 14, 2026

Guest

Aurora Hutchinson

Aurora Hutchinson, an award-winning audio storyteller and bioethics lab director. Barry Lam, philosopher and producer of Hi-Phi Nation. Joy Connolly, ACLS president and scholar of Roman political thought. They discuss whether audio scholarship can reshape hiring, tenure, and faculty reward systems. Conversation covers building institutional support, archiving and partnerships, and teaching podcasting as academic practice.

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INSIGHT

Academia Operates In An Alternative Economy

Academia functions as an alternative economy that often produces knowledge inward-facing rather than for the public.
Joy Connolly explains this using Fichte's question: to whom do scholars owe their work and why the university has created insulated professional habits.

ADVICE

Rewrite Reward Structures To Count Podcasts

Change faculty reward structures to recognise public scholarship like podcasts in hiring, tenure, and promotion guidelines.
Joy Connolly points to professional societies (MLA, AHA) that already provide evaluation guidelines for public scholarship and podcasts.

ANECDOTE

Barry's Hire Showed Podcasting Could Count

Barry Lam was hired at UC Riverside partly on the basis of his podcasting work and the department revised tenure guidelines so audio would count.
The hire combined departmental fans, an enterprising dean, and another faculty member with trade media (Maisha Cherry).

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This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In this third, and final, panel, Robert Boynton moderates a conversation which asks, “Can podcasts save the university?” In it, Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Dr. Aurora Hutchinson discuss what role podcasts might play in the university’s system of hiring, promotion and tenure.

Robert S. Boynton is the director of the Literary Reportage program, and associate director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is author of The Invitation Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’ s Abduction Project, and The New New Journalism.

Joy Connolly is president of the American Council of Learned Societies and a scholar of ancient Roman political thought and literature. At ACLS, she has led initiatives such as Doctoral Futures to broaden the scope and reach of humanistic inquiry. She is the author of The State of Speech and The Life of Roman Republicanism, and is completing a new book called All the World’ s Pasts.

Professor Barry Lam earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton, taught at Vassar, and recently moved to UC Riverside. He is the host and executive producer of Hi-Phi Nation, a story-driven podcast about philosophy, at Slate magazine. He is also an Associate Director of the Marc Sanders Foundation, which promotes excellence in philosophy and public philosophy.

Dr Lauren Arora Hutchinson, previously a BBC journalist, is an award-winning audio storyteller, an academic, and the inaugural director of the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab, a studio and incubator for world class stories at the intersection of science, ethics, medicine and public health, at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Lauren’s immersive audio work has premiered at IDFA and the Venice Film Festival. She has a PhD in History of Science with a focus on Oral History, and was a Wellcome Trust Imperial Media Fellow. She is the host of the signal award winning podcast playing god?

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