In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the ways in which undergraduates in the humanities have been responding to the rise of AI. Last year, the University of Michigan's history department put on workshops to begin discussing the impact of AI on teaching and learning and these first two episodes of the new season of the podcast seek to follow up on those conversations. In this episode we had a chance to talk to Cameron Amiot and Arjit Agarwal, two undergraduates involved in organizing a roundtable discussion on AI in the department, as well as Ella Hengeveld, the president of the university's undergraduate History Club. The episode also features discussions with Sandy Rozek, Education Lead at LSA's Generative AI Center of Excellence, and Richard Bachmann, a PhD candidate who was involved with focus groups that examined first year undergraduates' interactions with generative AI.

Hosted and produced by David Mori, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, with the Department of History Public Engagement Team: Stephen Berrey, Elizabeth Collins, and Joseph W. Ho.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the ways in which graduate students and faculty in the humanities have been responding to the rise of AI. Last year, the University of Michigan's history department put on workshops to begin discussing the impact of AI on teaching and learning and these first two episodes of the new season of the podcast seek to follow up on those conversations. In this episode we had a chance to talk to multiple graduate students and faculty to get a sense for some of the challenges they have encountered in the classroom, how they have reworked their approaches to teaching, and whether or not they think there is a place for generative AI in the practice of studying history. This episode also features a discussion with professor Joy Rohde, whose upcoming book People of the Machine provides some historical context for many of today's current questions and concerns surrounding AI.

Hosted and produced by David Mori, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan, with the Department of History Public Engagement Team: Stephen Berrey, Elizabeth Collins, and Joseph W. Ho.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the long history of conservative student activism on American college campuses. The popular image of the 1960s student is a protester against the Vietnam War or for civil rights. That same decade also saw the rise of right-wing student groups like Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. We explore how national leaders and donors built these groups, what they called grassroots organizing, and how they copied the tactics of the left. We also follow the students who later became prominent figures in the Republican Party, the courts, and conservative media, and trace the right's century-long fight with higher education up to today's campus culture wars.

Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd is a historian of American colleges and universities and a community scholar affiliate of Indiana University and the Society for US Intellectual History. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Sophie Wunderlich received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of the Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we visit KIN: Us and Our Kinds, an exhibit of paintings, comics, and sculpture by historian and artist Rafael Neis, and ask what happens when creative practice becomes a way of doing history. Drawing on ancient rabbinic stories, KIN explored how kinship, species, and bodies were once imagined as unstable and open to change. We talk with Neis about bringing art and scholarship together, teaching history through hands-on experiments, the medical history of classifying bodies, and how discomfort in front of art can start conversations.

Rafael Neis is Hermann P. & Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Neis is the author of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023). Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we follow the journey of Ugandan cultural artifacts from removal to repatriation, and what happens when they return home. Tracing historical materials and their layered afterlives as they moved from colonial Africa to the Cambridge Museum and back to the Uganda National Museum, we explore how collecting trajectories stripped objects of meaning, and how present-day recovery raises complex questions about belonging and identity.

Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University. Talitha Pam is a PhD candidate in the joint doctoral program in Anthropology and History, and a 2025-26 Graduate Student Research Fellow at the University of Michigan Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.

What happens when a neighborhood tells its own story? In this episode of Reverb Effect, we step into Detroit's Woodbridge neighborhood to hear firsthand accounts of resilience, memory, and change – from postwar life and the 1967 uprising to art, activism, and shifting pressures of today.

Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University. Richard Bachmann is a resident of Woodbridge and a PhD candidate in History. Angie Gaabo is a resident of Woodbridge and the former director of the Woodbridge Neighborhood Development nonprofit organization.

Explore more at the Woodbridge Digital Archive.

Nationalism. Emerging technology. Militarization. Destroyed bodies. Total war. In this episode, three historians reconsider the dominant themes of the First World War—which are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

Cheyenne Pettit studies Canadian and British conflicts over the treatment of venereal disease during World War One. Matthew Hershey's research explores meanings and experiences of soldiers' suicide in the First World War. And Lediona Shahollari focuses on the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange during the partition of those two states in the aftermath of the Great War. Join them in a conversation reflecting on the legacy of that conflict.

Archives are central to the work of historians. But they are not just for scholars. In this episode, we talk with an archivist, an archival theorist, and a historian, all working to democratize these spaces, what they hold, and who can access them.

Professor Patricia Garcia will help us think about the archives through a critical lens. Archivist Brian Williams will help us understand how to build an archive essentially from scratch. And Professor Stephen Berrey will help us understand what role the public can play in archival endeavors.