Dr. Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger in Norway. As you'll hear in this episode, Dolly is one very busy historian. She is the author of three books, including her newest, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums. She has also co-edited five books and written a truly impressive number of academic articles. She recently ended a term as the editor of the journal Environmental Humanities, and she co-directs the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, which is most known for its excellent series of online book talks.

As an environmental historian, I have been impressed not only by Dr. Dolly Jørgensen's work for years, but also by her warm and friendly presence at conferences and online. I was delighted when she said yes to coming on the show and talking with me about her writing process.

I was eager to hear from Dolly about how she juggles her projects, what draws her to a topic, and how working at a university in Scandinavia changes her approach to scholarship.

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Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.

• Dolly Jørgensen, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums
• Dolly Jørgensen, The Medieval Pig
• Dolly Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging
• Dolly Jørgensen's website
• Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities Book Talks Series
• Dolly Jørgensen on Bluesky
• Finn Arne Jørgensen
• Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait(and check out my Episode 3 interview with Bathsheba Demuth)

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In this episode, Kate welcomes Scott W. Stern and Dr. Charles O'Malley to the show.

Scott is a writer and lawyer who is the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction and has written for many media outlets and scholarly journals. Charlie is a dramaturg and writer who has worked at theaters across the country.

Together, they teamed up to write a new book titled Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. In it, they explore Shakespeare's character Margaret, a woman loosely based on a historical figure who is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life appears on stage. They introduce readers to her historical model, her creation by Shakespeare, and her evolution across centuries of performances to show how the character of Margaret illuminates the world in which she is created and brought to life. As they put it, her story "shows how Shakespeare's plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself." It seems only fitting that the book itself was a close collaboration. Scott and Charlie are co-writers, but they also began working on the book together shortly after they got married. By the time they were in the final editing stages, their twin sons had been born. We talked about how they navigated intertwined domestic and writing lives, as well as the challenges of bringing different voices and backgrounds together on the page.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Charles O'Malley and Scott Stern, Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen
• Scott Stern, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison 'Promiscuous' Women
• Scott Stern, There is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou
• Charles O'Malley, Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance
• Scott and Charlie's LitHub piece on writing together: "What Co-Writing a Book on Shakespeare Taught Us About Marriage and Parenthood"
• The Internet Archive's blog posts about the Controlled Digital Lending Program
• Sam Quinones, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
• Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation

In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Anna O. Law, a political science who retrained herself in historical methods to write her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. Anna is a professor of political science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. In her new books, she takes a close look at which parts and levels of government in the United States have controlled people's ability to move around and across borders throughout the country's history. It's a history that is especially pertinent now, as we await the Supreme Court's forthcoming decision about the Trump administration's attempt to end the right to birthright citizenship protected under the 14th amendment of the constitution.

Anna and Kate talked about what it meant to think like a historian as well as a political scientist. She also divulged her decidedly analog research tools, the feedback she asks colleagues to give on her drafts, and her advice for any writer deciding on a press for publishing a book.

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Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, not only will you be supporting the author, but you will also help to keep Drafting the Past going. Thank you!

• Anna O. Law's website
• Anna Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship
• Anna Law, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
• Metal page darts
• Sarasa gel pens
• Anna's favorite Clairefontaine notebooks
• Anna Law on BlueSky
• Anna's blog post about writing the second book
• Episode 102: Gautham Rao
• Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (and my first and second interviews with her)
• Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law and Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis Over Citizenship