The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman
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The Memory Project
3 Episodes on: Women in Sports
Scholarly Sources: Andrew Janiak
Meet the Press: University of Alberta Press
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The Memory Project
Columbia Journalism School runs The Memory Project, a course where students learn how to produce a book-length work of narrative non-fiction. Read the explanation of their project and subscribe to their Substack!
The Memory Project is a course where the goal is for us students to write, market, and ultimately publish a book of narrative nonfiction in just 15 weeks. The focus of the project is narrative inspired by memory. To start, we each choose a photograph to report on, and every week work to craft a narrative through our findings. Ultimately we are all trying to answer the question: What are the stories behind these photos?
As a team, we have two sets of goals: one for us, and one for you— our audience. For us, learning how to work as a team to produce a book-length work of narrative nonfiction is a learning experience that we hope to take with us beyond graduation. For our audience, our only wish is that you learn something from this project, and hopefully enjoy it! Whether that be inspiration for your own writing, or just the chance to discover a story you haven’t heard before.
Our class’s newsletter “The Memory Project 2025” publishes weekly on Substack. If you want a chance to meet the team, take a look at our first newsletter which includes each of our individual bios.
3 Episodes On: Women in Sports
As women’s history month draws to a close and March Madness unfolds, learn more about the history and status of women in sports.
Start off with Nancy Lough and Andrea N. Geurin’s interview about their edited volume, Routledge Handbook of the Business of Women's Sport. They bring together 40 authors to examine the position of women’s sports in global society. The essays range from discussions of the history of women's sports to the economics and management of women's sports.
In Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019), Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel explore women’s involvement in tennis, track, gymnastics, basketball, and futbol (soccer), and medical and media debates over which activities were “properly” or “improperly” feminine for women’s psychology, bodies, and futures as mothers. Using case studies from Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, they uncover the hidden history of physical education for girls in the late-nineteenth century and the subterranean struggles of girls and women to play sports across Latin America.
In Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity, Cat M. Ariail examines the careers and importance of women such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph. She demonstrates that it was the talent of these competitors that overcame many discriminatory assumptions and forced the nation’s sports cultures to broaden the notion of who could represent the USA in Olympic venues.
Scholarly Sources: Andrew Janiak
Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University and the co-leader of Project Vox. His most recent book, The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy concerns the thought of Émilie Du Châtelet and the origins of the canon in modern European philosophy.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I’m just finishing Michael Ondaatje’s wonderful post-colonial novel, The Cat’s Table. It has a lovely, light touch.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to give to people and why?
A: My favorite is the preface to Émilie Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics. It’s very broad and full of wisdom, counseling readers always to think for themselves and never to follow an idea because it came from a famous author. Great advice.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: Well, to be honest, it was the Critique of Pure Reason, by Kant, but not for the reason you might think. Most people are sensible: they read a book in college and find it moving, or interesting, or informative. But when I first read the Critique in college, I simply couldn’t understand it. Literally, not one sentence made sense. And that challenge fascinated me.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: That’s an easy one: James Baldwin. I was greatly moved by his work when I was in high school—he challenged many of my assumptions—and he taught at Hampshire College, where I studied. To my regret, he sadly passed away a few years before I arrived.
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: That would be A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s witty, original, challenging and moving all at the same time.
(Listen in to Jennifer Egan’s 2022 interview about The Candy House, a kind of sequel to the A Visit from the Goon Squad, on the NBN’s hosted podcast Burned by Books)
Q: Have you seen any museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: Yes, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a few months ago, I saw a little exhibit about Lillie Bliss, one of the three women who founded MoMA in the early twentieth century. It was wonderful to read about her creativity and eclectic aesthetic sense— she was way ahead of her time.
Read more about the exhibit here, and if you’re in the New York area check it out before the exhibit ends this Saturday!
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: That’s a tough one. I’ll cheat on this answer: I’ve been loving the new season of “Silo” on Apple TV, and so I might go find the original book, but then again, that’s often a bad idea, so I can’t decide yet.
Listen to Andrew’s full interview on the New Books Network!
Meet the Press: The University of Alberta Press
The University of Alberta Press is a contemporary, award-winning publisher of scholarly and creative books distinguished by their editorial care, exceptional design, and global reach. Subjects of specialty include Indigenous studies, critical race, gender, and class studies, literary criticism, Canadian history, regional topics, urban studies, environmental studies, travel narratives, literary nonfiction, and poetry. The University of Alberta Press publishes critical scholarly and literary books that seek to provide a platform for a wide range of voices that reflect the contemporary Canadian West: urban, cosmopolitan, and diverse. Check out their exciting book series including Patterns of Northern Traditional Healing, which surveys important local and regional healing traditions in northern regions, Wayfarer, about literary travel, and the Robert Kroetsch Series which highlights Canadian creative writing, short stories, and poetry.
Tune in to some of the exciting interviews with authors who published with The University of Alberta Press below!
In Contemporary Vulnerabilities: Reflections on Social Justice Methodologies, these scholars explore the many vulnerabilities within social science research, this interdisciplinary collection gathers critical stories, reflections, and analyses about innovative methodologies that engage with unconventional and unexpected spaces of research that scholars inhabit and share.
Listen to author Astrid Blodgett discuss her short story collection, This is How You Start to Disappear. These stories explore the consequences of grief, denial, and single moments that change perceptions, lives, and attachments forever.
In 1938, the small community in Edmonton opened the first mosque in the country, which would come to play a key role in shaping Islam's development in the Canada. Earle H. Waugh’s micro-history of this community in Al Rashid Mosque: Building Canadian Muslim Communities opens up vistas on the broader Canadian history and the role of Muslims in forming national projects and identities.