We were doing criticism together and it had that electricity you sometimes get in a seminar room or a reading group, or sometimes just smoking cigarettes with some fellow grad students on somebody’s porch.
The American Vandal Podcast, created and hosted by Matt Seybold and sponsored by Center For Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, explores questions of literature, labor, history, and politics, drawing connections between the work and life of Mark Twain and the contemporary condition. For me personally, The American Vandal is one of the most valuable resources out there right now—it is simultaneously a rigorous archive of scholarly conversations, an accessible resource that, as Brian Deyo puts it, allows us to “steal time back and imagine ways to reclaim the commons in our classroom praxis.” It is also a lively, deeply engaging listen. Listening to The American Vandal while driving to work or washing dishes or taking a walk loops us into critical, urgent conversations about the state of criticism, culture, and academia today.
We spoke to Matt about the history, purpose, and trajectory of his work on The American Vandal.
Can you tell us a bit about your initial vision for The American Vandal when it launched in 2020, and how the project has evolved since then? Did you hope/know from the start that the podcast would become a space for public thinking and criticism?
Matt Seybold: Launching The American Vandal was initially an act of adaptation, one might even say desperation. During the pandemic we cancelled or postponed more than a year’s worth of in-person programming, which for us meant a dozen lectures, a symposium, a teaching institute, and an international conference. We needed to come up with creative ways to keep fulfilling our mission and the podcast was initially something of a slap-dash substitute.
Many of the guests during the first season were people who had already been booked to appear in some other venue. If you listen to those early episodes, you can tell we’re kind of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, and much of it doesn’t. I was learning sound-editing and even a little sound-engineering. I was getting valuable reps as an interviewer, narrator, and host. All kinds of technical experience quite apart from conceiving how to frame episodes and structure seasons and create an identity for the show.
I had read enough media theory to know that the formulas that worked for our live events were not going to directly translate to the podcast. We abandoned the lecture right away. I had a strong preference for framing episodes around something other than the guest’s most recent book, even though that was often my reason for having them on and I did want to promote their work. And once I tried it, I really liked recording with more than one guest. I think the first group was Jalylah Burrell, Bambi Haggins, and Maggie Hennefeld, who were supposed to be part of the 2020 Quarry Farm Symposium.
The first episode that really took off and started building our subscriber base was the one I did with Sheri-Marie Harrison about “Lovecraft Country,” where she’s explaining the “New Black Gothic” and some of the other ideas from her research, but we’re applying them in real time to this popular cultural product. We were doing criticism together and it had that electricity you sometimes get in a seminar room or a reading group, or sometimes just smoking cigarettes with some fellow grad students on somebody’s porch. A podcast can’t be only that, but I think that was what I was chasing, especially since during that first year many of us were cut off from other forms of collegiality.
There were a lot of people, in 2020-2021, who mentioned, sometimes tearfully, how precious it was to them just to talk about books and theory and academic research, and to feel like those were things worth talking about. That was precious for me too. And I think, to some degree, The American Vandal is still therapeutic for scholars in isolation, although it has hopefully been able to also become more than that as its format evolved.
The current season of The American Vandal, “A Tale of Today,” takes Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today as its inciting structure—thinking about the “dual and sometimes dueling periodizations” of the historical Gilded Age and our own contemporary moment. How did you pick A Tale of Today as this season’s frame? As the podcast host and coordinator, what does it look like on your end to weave together both the thematic links of this season’s episodes and the overarching narrative of the season?
I’ve been thinking about the analogy between the Gilded Age and the contemporary for a long time. I co-organized a symposium on the topic in 2018 and co-edited a special issue of ALH in 2019. I’m a sucker for both periodization analogies and political economy homologies, and the popular “New Gilded Age” framing is both. But I’d also been looking for a way to appropriately mark the sesquicentennial of Twain’s first foray into novel-writing. The Gilded Age was drafted in like four months, and it shows. But it’s still a really fun and fascinating read, and one could argue that naming a whole damn era of U.S. history is a pretty big impact for a novel. I thought the Center For Mark Twain Studies should celebrate that by digging into both its historicisms and its presentisms.
So that’s the premise, and it’s loose and baggy by design, because I want to start doing the interviews as quickly as possible. They are the magnets, everything else—the archival audio, the music, the quotations, my research and narration—converges to them, so I really want the major questions and arguments to surface from those conversations, not to be prescribed by me in advance.
That said, my supposition is, and so far listeners seem to agree, those conversations are more generative when they are intentionally juxtaposed with each other and supplemented by a loosely-unifying or at least contextualizing narrative.
I’d recorded about 20 interviews before I made the first episode of this season, and I’ve recorded a dozen or so since. I’ve got probably another dozen planned. So at this moment, there’s about fifteen hours of finished podcast. But I’ve got probably twice that much raw, unmastered audio, not to mention The Gilded Age narration and some archival surprises. I’m constantly mapping and remapping how it all might fit together in my notebook, and drafting little snippets of potential script. So I’ve got a sense in my head of where things are headed, but as with any work in progress, it’s going to surprise me. And I try not to get wedded to anything until I’m actually tracking that forthcoming episode.
Obviously, I’m inviting the comparison between stereographic seasons and academic monographs. And there are many ways in which my training and experience in archival research, academic editing, and public writing are appropriate to producing The American Vandal. But there is one key difference. In critical writing, it’s almost always best to make your claims and your commitments crystal clear. Sometimes that’s appropriate to the podcast as well, but far more often it is best to trust the guests, and even more so the listeners.
So, for instance, in the episode I’m working on right now I’ve got Tressie McMillan Cottom talking about the counterproductive rivalry between professors and journalists, followed by Jelani Favors discussing the precarity of HBCU archives, followed, I think, by a little snippet of FDR giving a speech at Howard University, followed by Astra Taylor talking about the unschooling movement. These are all what I would consider A+ excerpts, and, in aggregate, it’s about 55 minutes of mastered audio. I’d like my links between the excerpts to add no more than eight minutes, to transition, to make clear who’s speaking, to suggest why you should care what they have to say. In this case, I don’t need to summarize takeaways or telegraph connections. The audience can do that very capably, and that’s part of the pleasure of listening, I think, is puzzling these things together, becoming a part of the collective critical enterprise that is taking place in and across each episode.
I love the way you talk about the pleasure of listening, and the kind of kaleidoscopic structure you make available to your listeners. You make it possible for the listener to both learn from you and your guests, and also to jumpstart their own critical analysis—via introducing listeners to the guests and their work, as well as through things like your episode bibliographies and other community structures and resources. These aspects invite the audience into that critical conversation, into the ongoing contextualizing narrative of the season.
Part of the contextualizing narrative for this season so far, especially in recent episodes, has been the collisions of labor, education, and the interests of finance, capital, and private equity. So much of that terrain—thinking about curriculum, enshittification, archives, student labor, student athletics, etc.—hits close to home for those of us engaged in trying to organize our academic workplaces and fight for this profession during times of austerity. It seems to me that The American Vandal itself is the kind of collective community structure for accessible, rigorous education that the contemporary university in the US, as an institution, seems bent on enclosing or eradicating. Do you feel these tensions operating as you yourself engage in the work of making this project?
Another way of putting this might be that there’s a degree of what some might call “labor of love” (though you might, like me, balk at that phrase!) in constructing public community structures that are not always “legible” in the way an academic monograph might be.
There’s a very specific moment in season three, the one that’s ostensibly about Netflix’s The Chair, when I was like, “This is it. This is what the podcast is about.” You might be able to tell just by listening to it. But I was recording an episode with Michelle Chihara and Kyla Wazana Tompkins in which we were looking at this mass cultural representation of literary studies academe through the lens of Kyla’s then recently-published essay, “The Shush.” And I was mostly just sitting there listening to these two accomplished women of color talk in candid and affecting ways about their experience of the profession, while simultaneously demonstrating the abundance of skill and knowledge they had accrued as part of that profession. And I just remember thinking, “There’s nothing like this anywhere.”
It’s déclassé to discuss your working conditions in the context of a peer-reviewed essay or conference paper. And so the discussion of those working conditions (this is part of the thrust of Kyla’s argument) is safely confined to commiseration in bars and coffee shops and faculty lounges and group texts, or its anesthetized and anonymized in Critical University Studies scholarship which, with some notable exceptions, often reads as a kind of navel-gazing that fails to demonstrate the pleasure and energy of humanities knowledge-making even as its arguing for the preservation of those pleasures and energies.
The next season was “The World’s Work,” where I took Twain’s fascination with labor movements and publications inspired by labor movements as an on-ramp for discussing labor conditions, but also contemporary cultural representation of embattled workers like The French Dispatch and Ministry For The Future and The Baby. In every ensuing series that’s the needle I’m trying to thread (sometimes more successfully than others): let’s talk openly about heterodox political economy, working conditions, and labor activism, but let’s never stop interpreting texts while we do so. Scholars are so fucking fun to talk to about literally any work of art, whether they like it or not, whether they’ve studied it or not. When we let go of the pressure to perform expertise and just let our expertise go to work, I really think that’s when we are most relatable and effective. There’s a forthcoming episode where I just asked Anna Kornbluh and Jeff Insko to close-read the title of Twain and Warner’s novel. Or earlier this season I asked Astra Taylor to tell the story of Robin Hood in her own words. Those are my favorite kinds of questions because they can’t elicit prefab answers. That’s when humanities scholars cook.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast, & founding director of EC’s Media Studies, Communication, & Design program. He is happily married with a house, two kids, a border collie, and extremely strong, some have even said “fascistic,” opinions about smoothies.
Olivia Stowell is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, where her dissertation project explores race, gender, and labor in contemporary reality TV. Currently, she is enjoying Peacock’s The Traitors, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and HBO’s adaptation of My Brilliant Friend.