The Modern Scholar Podcast

Dr. Betty Lai is an Associate Professor in Counseling Psychology at Boston College. Dr. Lai’s research focuses on the impacts of the climate crisis and disasters such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires on children. Dr. Lai is the author of The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars from Princeton University Press, and this book is the subject of our conversation today. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dr. Lai’s work has been recognized with numerous awards. In 2022, she received the Distinguished Research Award in Counseling from Division E of the American Educational Research Association and the Dorothy Booz Black Award for Outstanding Contributions in Health Psychology from Division 17 of the American Psychological Association. For the resources Dr. Lai mentioned in the episode, see below: How to talk to a program officer: https://scholarfoundations.com/blog/post/why-you-need-to-talk-to-a-program-officer Free grant samples: https://scholarfoundations.com/samples Information about the book: thegrantwritingguide.com

Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Adrian received an A.B in International Relations from Stanford University in 1991, and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995. From 1999 to 2001, Miller served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton with his Initiative for One America – the first free-standing office in the White House to address issues of racial, religious and ethnic reconciliation. Miller went on to serve as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. From 2004 to 2010, he served on the board for the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is currently the executive director of the Colorado Council of Churches and, as such, is the first African American, and the first layperson, to hold that position. In 2018, Adrian was awarded the Ruth Fertel “Keeper of the Flame Award” by the Southern Foodways Alliance, in recognition of his work on African American foodways. Miller’s first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time won the James Beard Foundation Award for Scholarship and Reference in 2014. His second book, The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas was published on President’s Day 2017. It was a finalist for a 2018 NAACP Image Award for “Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction,” and the 2018 Colorado Book Award for History. Adrian’s third book is Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue, and is the subject of our conversation today.

Katherine Sharp Landdeck is a Professor of History at Texas Woman’s University, the home of the WASP archives. A Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and a graduate of the University of Tennessee, where she was a Normandy Scholar and earned her Ph.D. in American History, Landdeck has received numerous awards for her work on the WASP and has appeared as an expert on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS, and the History channel. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Time, as well as in numerous academic and aviation publications. She is the author of The Women with Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II, which is the subject of our conversation today. To top it all off, Dr. Landdeck is a licensed pilot who flies whenever she can!

Dr. Ron Granieri is Professor of History in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College, where he is the editor and principal host of A Better Peace, the official podcast of The War Room. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago, he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where he hosts a monthly talk show, “People, Politics and Prose with Ron Granieri.” His research focuses on transatlantic relations, German politics, and the Cold War. He is the author of ⁠The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966 ⁠(Berghahn, 2003), as well as articles and op-eds in journals including Orbis, Central European History, the International History Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. To contact Ron, start here. I should point out that today’s conversation is covered by our standard disclaimer for federally-employed guests—the comments from Ron today are his views alone and do not represent the Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Dr. Jeremy Yellen is a historian of modern Japan based in Hong Kong. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and since 2014 has been teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Jeremy’s research focuses on modern Japan’s international, diplomatic, and political history. His work largely grapples with questions of warfare, empire, diplomacy, and international order, and pair Japanese high policy during World War II with developments in the periphery of Japan’s empire. Much of his work makes use of transnational and comparative perspectives to place Japanese history in its proper global context. His first book, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, was published by Cornell University Press in April 2019 and is being re-released in paperback, and is the subject of our conversation today.

Dr. Robert “Bob” Wettemann is an Associate Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a B.A. with Honors in History from Oklahoma State University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from Texas A&M University. He is the author of Privilege vs. Equality: Civil Military Relations in the Jacksonian Era, 1815-1845 (Praeger Security International, 2009) and numerous articles and book chapters on U.S. military and public history. He has previously taught in the History Department at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, contributed in the Command Historian’s Office of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and served as Director of the U.S. Air Force Academy Center for Oral History. His current project, Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs: American Ingenuity in World War Two, explores the junction of innovation and technology among GIs in the Second World War.

Benjamin Allison is a PhD student in History and a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in 20th century US foreign relations, especially vis-á-vis the Middle East and Russia. He is the lead author of the forthcoming book Die in Your Rage: The Logic of Violence in Jihadist Insurgency with Samuel S. Stanton. A graduate of Kent State University, his master’s thesis examined American relations with a group of rejectionist Arabs, known as the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front, during and after the Camp David peace process. He argues that the peace process and the coming of the Second Cold War were intimately connected, and hopes to continue this research for his dissertation, using Russian- and Arabic-language sources to paint a fuller picture of the transnational and international dimensions of this critical juncture in modern history. *Originally recorded on March 17, 2022.

Dr. Kyriakos Nalmpantis is Chair of the Department of History and assistant professor of European history at Baldwin Wallace University. He has a total of nineteen years teaching experience, and in addition to teaching at Baldwin Wallace, has taught at Cleveland State University, Kent State University, and at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His primary research focus is on wartime Greece and the Balkans, but he is also a specialist in Reformation-era Europe, contemporary European history and modern Latin American history. At Baldwin Wallace, he also teaches a course on classical antiquity that is mostly focused on ancient Greece and Rome. In 2011, his dissertation, Time on the Mountain: The Office of Strategic Services in Axis-Occupied Greece, won the Modern Greek Studies Association’s biennial Iatrides Dissertation Prize for best dissertation. He has also published short biographical articles on three important Greek Orthodox prelates — Metropolitan Germanos Karavaggelis, Archbishop Damaskinos and Archbishop Makarios — in the Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics (Greenwood Publishing, 2006). Dr. Nalmpantis also serves on both the National Council and the Scholarship Committee for Phi Alpha Theta, which is the National Honor Society for History. Dr. Nalmpantis has his master’s degree and his PhD in history from Kent State University, which is where we crossed paths – I took his History of the Balkans class as an upper division undergrad when I was there at Kent State and it was one of my favorite classes in undergrad – it definitely deepened my interest in the Balkans, and his unique and captivating, really effortless classroom teaching style still stands out in my mind to this day as one that I might hopefully be able to emulate at some point!

Felton Thomas is the Executive Director of Cleveland Public Library in Cleveland, Ohio. Since beginning his tenure at CPL, Director Thomas has furthered the mission of CPL to be “The People’s University,” including launching initiatives aimed at addressing community needs in the areas of access to technology, education, and economic development. Prior to taking the role in Cleveland, Mr. Thomas served as Director of Regional Branch Services for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District in Las Vegas, Nevada and as President of the Nevada Library Association. Felton’s awards and accomplishments include being named a “Mover and Shaker” by the Library Journal, and acting as a fellow in the Urban Library Council’s Executive Leadership Institute. Nationally, Felton has served on the board of Directors of the Public Library Association (PLA), and as a member of the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning and the Internet, a forum to determine the best way to increase digital learning and innovation without compromising safety. Felton is an active member of the Greater Cleveland community, having served as Board President of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, and as trustee on the boards of Sisters of Charity Foundation, University Circle Inc., United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland and United Way of Greater Cleveland.

Stephanie Hinnershitz is Senior Historian with the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum and earned her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2013, and then served as an assistant professor at Valdosta State University and again at Cleveland State University before joining the team at the Museum. Her specialty is the American home front and civil-military relations during World War II, and her award-winning work has been supported with grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the Office of Diversity at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her most recent book, Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II, was published in 2021 with the University of Pennsylvania Press and was awarded the 2021 Philip Taft Labor History Award, and we’ll be talking about this book and some of Stephanie’s additional research today!