Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #1 with Benjamen Walker and Fanny Gribenski

Mar 12, 2026

Fanny Gribenski, historical musicologist and NYU professor who studies material histories of instruments. She presents The Elephant in the Piano, tracing pianos through ivory, wood, felt, and metal. Short segments explore Adirondack spruce soundboards, local oral histories from Ivorytown, and why a book and podcast together deepen sensory and archival storytelling.

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INSIGHT

Material Histories Reveal Piano's Global Footprint

The Elephant in the Piano traces the piano's global impact by following its primary materials rather than just musical practices.
Fanny links ivory, wood, felt, and metal to extractivism and ecological and labor histories, reframing the piano as an agent of environmental and social change.

ANECDOTE

Adirondack Spruce Links Pianos And Guide Boats

Fanny recorded a Steinway factory interview with Mike Moore describing Adirondack spruce's stiffness-to-weight advantage for soundboards.
She then visited a boat builder who explained the same spruce was chosen for the Adirondack guide boat for extreme lightness and portability.

INSIGHT

Podcast Serves As Archive For Unrecorded Voices

Fanny found the historical record skewed toward company archives, so she turned to ethnography and oral history to recover workers' and nonhuman perspectives.
The podcast provides a 'home' for those recorded conversations and present-day site visits that the book might marginalize.

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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 the first panel, podcaster Benjamen Walker discusses his work with NYU media studies professor Mara Mills as they produce Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching technology. Professor Mills is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of disability studies, Science and Technology Studies, and sound studies. She teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and is Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Her work on “disability and media” spans disability arts and technoscience, with a focus on the history, politics, and cultures of electronics and digital media. Benjamen Walker is a radio writer and producer. He is one of the co-founders of the podcast network Radiotopia from PRX, and for a decade hosted and produced his award winning program Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything.

The first panel concluded with a presentation by NYU musicologist Fanny Gribenski in which she discusses her current project, The Elephant in the Piano: Music, Ecology, Empire. The book, and podcast, is an investigation of the 19th century piano through a material history of its primary components: ivory, wood, felt, and metal. Professor Gribenski is a historical musicologist who specializes in the history of musical and sonic practices. Her first book, L'Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l'espace (Paris, 1830–1905) analyzes the role of music in the production of sacred spaces. Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics, 1859-1955 (University of Chicago, 2023) traces the rocky path towards international pitch standardization.

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