Prof Talk

In this conversation, I speak with Sophie Alexander, a Master’s student in Kinesiology at the University of Victoria, whose research explores the relationship between climbing, physical activity, identity development and belonging. Sophie Alexander is a Master’s student in Kinesiology at the University of Victoria, where her research examines how climbing, social experience and a sense of belonging can influence physical activity and identity development. Our conversation centres on climbing as something more than physical exercise: how it can shape identity, confidence and connection, and how the social environment surrounding a sport can influence whether people feel that they belong and want to remain physically active.

In this conversation, I speak with Jennifer Kramer. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and Curator of the Pacific Northwest at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has worked with the Nuxalk Nation since 1994. For more than two decades, she has worked alongside Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers and communities, exploring how museums can become places of collaboration, cultural renewal and shared authority. Her scholarship focuses on the visual and material cultures of Northwest Coast First Nations, particularly the Nuxalk and Kwakwaka’wakw, and includes questions of representation, repatriation, cultural property, art-market economies and collaborative museology. She is the author of *Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity* and *Kesu’: The Art and Life of Doug Cranmer*, and co-editor of *Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas*. Through her research, teaching and curatorial practice, she has helped reshape conversations about Northwest Coast Indigenous art, museum anthropology and the evolving relationship between museums and Indigenous communities. Our conversation centres on one remarkable exhibition: *Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun*. Co-curated by Snxakila–Clyde Tallio, Director of Culture and Language for the Nuxalk Nation, and Jennifer Kramer, it was the first exhibition devoted entirely to the Nuxalk Nation. Bringing together more than sixty historic Nuxalk treasures from museum, private and family collections, the exhibition at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology demonstrated how language, governance, law, ceremony, artistic practice and community leadership remain deeply interconnected. It also showed how museums can become places of return, reconnection and renewed relationships, while affirming Nuxalk sovereignty and self-determination. Jennifer is now co-authoring a forthcoming publication exploring the exhibition’s continuing impacts and legacies, tentatively titled *Relations and Returns: Reconnecting Nuxalk Treasures and Kin*.

In this conversation, I speak with Sonia Del Re, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada. Sonia Del Re holds a Master’s degree in Museology and a PhD in Art History. She first interned at the National Gallery of Canada in 2004–05 and officially joined its curatorial team in 2006. Today, she oversees a remarkable collection of more than 27,000 works of art on paper, created around the world between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. Her curatorial work spans Dutch landscapes, the Carracci, Chagall, Pre-Raphaelite drawings, Picasso’s Vollard Suite, Venetian portraiture, early European monsters, and, most recently, Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault. In our conversation, we speak about drawings, prints, the life of the vault, curatorial research, and what works on paper can reveal about artists, history, and the intimate life of images.

The Blue Hour: Sackbuts, Soundscapes, Bells, and Reformation Germany My interview with Professor Alex Fisher is now available as a podcast. In this conversation, I speak with Professor Fisher about bells, early music, soundscapes, weather, ritual, and the religious worlds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Alex Fisher is Professor in the UBC School of Music, where he coordinates Early Music. He is both a distinguished musicologist and a performing musician. Trained as a trombonist, he later specialized in the Renaissance sackbut and has performed with leading early music ensembles. He is also a co-founder of Cappella Borealis. As a scholar, Professor Fisher studies the musical, religious, and cultural worlds of early modern Germany, with particular interests in soundscapes, ritual, and the relationship between music and religious identity during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. His work has appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. His books include Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg and Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria. We focus especially on two of his more recent publications: his chapter “Bells” in Information: A Historical Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2021, and his article “Hearing the Trumpets of the Church Militant: Weather Bells and Supernatural Audition in Post-Reformation Germany,” published in the Sixteenth Century Journal in 2022. Together, they invite us to think about bells not simply as musical instruments, but as technologies of communication, symbols of civic and religious life, and, for many centuries, voices believed to reach both human and supernatural listeners.

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Claudio Vellutini, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia School of Music, about opera in Vienna and the cultural exchanges that shaped one of Europe’s most influential musical centres. Drawing on his recent chapter in *Vienna: A Musical History* and his book *Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon*, Claudio traces the development of opera in Vienna from the seventeenth century to the present day. We discuss the arrival of Italian opera at the Habsburg court, the role of theatres and institutions in shaping Vienna’s musical identity, and why opera has remained such a powerful cultural force for more than four centuries.

In this episode of The Blue Hour, Farha Guerrero introduces Gyaahlaang G̱udee, an episode from X̱aad Kast, the podcast of Dr. Jasḵwaan Bedard, featuring her own reflections, research, and teaching on X̱aad Kíl, the Old Massett / Northern Haida language. Dr. Bedard is a Haida language educator and advocate from G̱aw Tlagée, Massett, Haida Gwaii. She is an Assistant Professor in the Indigenous Languages Program in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. Her work focuses on Indigenous language revitalization, X̱aad Kíl, immersion, pedagogy, translation, and language learning guided by Haida community, laws, and values. The episode is titled Gyaahlaang G̱udee, with Dr. J. The title means “Radio” in X̱aad Kíl. This episode is drawn mostly from Chapters 3 and 4 of Dr. Bedard’s 2025 dissertation, A Haida Research Framework for Learning X̱aad Kíl.

Jaymie Matthews is an astrophysicist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on stellar seismology — the study of star vibrations — and he is closely associated with MOST, the Microvariability and Oscillations of STars telescope, Canada’s first space telescope. In this conversation, we discuss how astronomers study the hidden interiors of stars, what tiny changes in starlight can reveal, and how space telescopes such as MOST helped open new ways of observing the universe. We also explore exoplanets, stellar pulsations, the relationship between light and sound in astronomy, and the way small missions can make a large scientific impact. The conversation also touches on Jaymie’s long career at UBC, his work as a public communicator of astronomy, his recognition as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and the larger question of how science, imagination, and wonder meet when we look at the night sky. Recorded live on CiTR 101.9 FM.

A conversation about music theory, popular music, and the history of music notation as an object of aesthetic and visual significance.