Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Canadian author, Nichola Zacher, writer of the adventures of the Marley series of children’s books. The second instalment, ‘Marley the Dreamer’, is newly released and we learn from Nichola how it is a response to her father being diagnosed with dementia. We discover how Nichola’s literary career started. Nichola lives in Ontario but her grandmother was born in Bournemouth, England. In her books, Nichola draws on real life experiences from her dad’s life. She talks about how Marley touches her readers’ hearts, and we learn about the influences on her writing – love, acceptance and empathy – and how books are a good way to connect with children. Nichola reflects on how she was able to do book signings before Covid and we learn that she used to work as an early childhood teacher. We discover that she doesn’t intend to return to that and is enjoying keeping her father’s story alive. Nichola talks about her kind teacher from England who helped her along the way, and we find out th

My guest this week is Bob Bowie, Professor of Worldviews Education at Canterbury Christ Church University and Director of the National Institute of Christian Education. We learn that Bob, who lives in West Kent, started out by studying classics and philosophy and went on to train as an RE teacher.  We discuss the question of what RE is, whether people study religion because they are religious, and the implications for census data. Bob recalls growing up in Enfield, North London, and its Victorian parks and being one of three kids in his class at school who had parents who were born in England. Bob explains why the city is a place to visit rather than to live and why there are some things he doesn’t want to go back to, e.g. the violence that was a regular part of his time in school.  Bob, though, sees this as a gift as it gave him opportunities to discover forms of hospitality he hadn’t experienced before, and we talk about being the victim of bullying.  There is something about music that is inter

It was a huge pleasure to record my second Nostalgia Interview with Darren Griffin, Professor of Genetics, whom I first met in 2019 (to hear that episode go to Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy / Darren Griffin). For our catch up interview we talk about the implications of lockdown on his work and how lockdown has enabled Darren and his team to have a productive year, publishing 43 manuscripts. We talk about the adoption of different work practices and why recording your own lectures can be the worst of all worlds. We discuss synchronous and asynchronous modes of delivery and what shape teaching will take post-lockdown. We learn about his musical passions and the way radio can improve your mood. He talks about resurrecting old tech – Darren has his record deck in his kitchen as well as a home cinema, and we both share a Bucks Fizz connection. Darren also reveals how during lockdown he would declutter his house every weekend and how he took up cycling. His lab does a review of the year, and we talk about

My guest this week is Árni Svanur Daníelsson who is the Head of Communication for the Lutheran World Federation. We learn that Árni used to work in a video rental shop and became acquainted with film history. He went on to study theology at university and was involved in a theology and film group Deus ex Cinema. We talk about the theology and film field and the possibilities that online communication have brought about, including podcasts which are allowing people to be creative. Árni was born in Iceland in 1973, he grew up in a small family and he remembers growing up around a big forest. He talks about why The Empire Strikes Back, which he saw at the cinema three times, is such a key memory for him. We also learn about Árni’s musical influences and how music has been a way for him to connect with his children. Árni talks about doing his degree in Iceland and his research on the way pastors are represented in film, and he discusses how film is a good way of understanding and of critique. We discover

It was a huge pleasure to meet Sr. Rose Pacatte, who is based in Culver City CA, around 9 miles from Hollywood, for my latest Nostalgia Interview. Rose is from San Diego originally and we learn that she planned to be a Sister from a young age. She started the Pauline Center for Media Studies and in the interview Rose talks about how she became a film critic. Faith and film came about at the same time for Rose, and we learn that she first saw The Searchers when she was seven and how it is one of her most important films. Rose is currently working on a chapter in a book for Routledge on social justice, human rights and media literacy education. Rose has recently been to the cinema for the first time in a year and we find out why she prefers independent cinema to those (many) quests for Jesus figures in superhero movies. We learn why The Matrix made such an impression on Rose and why meaning is made between the screen and the audience, rather than by what the director (necessarily) intends. She talks ab

My guest this week is Paul Hedges, Associate Professor in Interreligious Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. Paul and I were contemporaries in the University of Wales and we learn about how Lampeter made him the academic and person that he is today. We learn about the days when computers weren’t used for writing essays, when students would pay someone to type up their dissertations for them, and the library had a card catalogue. Paul tells us about the time he once derived his inspiration for writing an essay from a strong bottle of cider. The whole Lampeter experience was like a bubble, quite different from the rest of the world. Paul reflects on what it has been like to go back on the other side of the fence, as it were, and he recalls the chance in Lampeter to explore the countryside. He talks about his lower middle class upbringing and how he would play Dungeons & Dragons back in the days when it wasn’t cool to be nerdy

My guest this week is Christine Atchison, who lives in the suburbs of Toronto, and recently completed a PhD which explored transcendence in film. Christine talks about how the 1989 Batman film started her interest in this area, as did a conversation in a bar on pluralism in the Patristic period. Christine discusses imposter syndrome and Eliade and talks about why she enjoyed her PhD viva. She studied in the UK and moved to China and she was fascinated to see how superhero movies were received there compared to the West. We talk about whether people will become used to watching films at home in the future, post-lockdown, and whether there is a future for films to be primarily cinema, and communal, based. Christine talks about why her experience of watching Batman vs. Superman was very different from that of her friends – and how the experience of watching the movie at the cinema is the reason for that. We learn that Christine started studying biology and history when she was at university and we learn

It was such a pleasure for my latest Nostalgia Interview to catch up with Kate Fox – poet, stand up comedian, academic, journalist, broadcaster and ethnographer. Kate talks about her last gig before lockdown, our love of lattes and living by the sea, and her connection with the University of Kent through comedy studies and the Autism and the Arts festivals. We discuss our conference food experiences and how buffets and carveries are likely to be casualties of the pandemic. Kate relays her lockdown experiences and what has changed for her. We learn that she recorded an episode of Radio 4’s Pick of the Week from her living room on her phone and why she has no urge to do proper stand up in front of a Zoom audience. Kate has written a book about Northern women, and she talks about whether Covid has given us a chance to do things differently in this new hybrid world as well as about the way in which universities have changed since the 1990s in terms of the way they deal with disability and neurodiversity

My guest this week is Celia Pontin, who works for the Committees of Advertising Practice, and has done a PhD (I was her supervisor) on video games and theology. Celia talks about how for her a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle – and that this is the element that makes it fun. She explains how she drew on the religion and film methodology and looked at how the interactive nature of video games affects our ability to interpret them meaningfully through a theological lens.  We talk about why someone might choose to be a villain in a game and how video games give us the freedom to consider options we wouldn’t consider ‘being’ in real life. We bring in the question of fatalism in the case of fixed narratives. We learn that Celia originally considered going to university to do astrophysics and that when she was a teenager she had wanted to be a vicar. We learn why she doesn’t always like describing her PhD to people she doesn’t particularly know and she reflects on the influen

My guest this week is Adele Reinhartz, Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. We learn how work in religion and film became an interest of hers and that Adele was active and non-athletic in childhood. She grew up in a secular Jewish household and ended up majoring in Jewish Studies and by default Religious Studies. We discuss whether Judaism is a religion or should be configured as an identity. Adele talks about work on Christ-figures in the light of Judas and the Black Messiah and she looks at why we have these tropes at a time of a decline of religious literacy. She talks about her teaching approach and whether and how to screen a film to her students. Her parents loved the movies and Adele talks about how she took her own children and now her grandchildren to the cinema. She tells us about her most indelibly etched experience of going to the movies, which involves going to see The Jungle Book and we discuss why people enjoy sad movies. We learn t

For my 100th Nostalgia Interview, it was a massive pleasure to meet Pete Paphides, a music journalist who has written for Melody Maker, Q and Time Out and has been the chief music critic for The Times. Pete’s memoir Broken Greek, with the wonderful sub-title A Story of Chip Shops and Pop Songs, was Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Pete also went to Lampeter, where he studied Philosophy from 1989-92, and Pete begins the interview by talking about his fond memories of rainy mornings in Lampeter and the culture shift he experienced from having left the city of Birmingham for one of the smallest campuses in the country. Pete relays his experiences of hearing the sound of sheep at night and we talk about the notion of ‘infinite choice’. Pete tells us about his more recent, very felicitous visit to a shoe shop in Aberaeron and we learn that Pete wrote Broken Greek in coffee shops – and how Lampeter kickstarted the idea of the café as office. Pete talks about his reasons for writing what he calls a ‘confusion memoi

Anna Neale is my latest Nostalgia Interview guest, and it was a huge pleasure to meet up with Anna who is a music industry professional. Anna is an artist, songwriter, composer, engineer and producer, she has toured the world, and released three albums. Anna has also served on various music industry committees including the Ivors and has been in the music industry for 20 years.  Anna, who is based at the University of Kent, talks about how academia is a form of performance and how there are other industry professionals who have made a similar journey into academia. She compares putting out an album to putting out a research paper. Anna’s research focuses on songwriting in industry practice, and she talks about how she has always been business savvy. She also examines the implications of technology on songwriting and discusses how we are living in an attention economy – where time, not money, is what is precious. There is a disassociation now between the artist and the fan, and Anna talks about how th

For my latest Nostalgia Interview it was a huge pleasure to meet up with Theo Wildcroft. Theo has undertaken a PhD with the Open University in the area of practice relationships in Yoga and we find out why Theo misses driving time, and will now walk with her greyhound during lockdown. We talk about the importance of having designated work space and we discuss the role of fieldwork in her PhD, which consisted of looking at festivals and camps to which yoga teachers go, and how it is an intense, entangled type of research, involving telling untold stories. Theo does yoga teacher training and we find out about her background in which she studied languages at Cambridge where she was very impressed by a talk given by Hélène Cixous who prompted her to think of the role of viscerality in language. Theo talks about finding an inaccessibility in academia and how she waited 10 years before doing her Masters. Her school didn’t have a 6th form and she went from a tertiary college to Oxbridge. We find out why she

For my latest Nostalgia Interview it was a huge pleasure to meet up via Zoom with Aled Thomas. Aled currently works at the University of Wolverhampton and did his first degree in Religious Studies at Trinity College Carmarthen from 2007-10. We learn how his goal had been to become an RE teacher but that academia called him back. Aled’s research area is the Church of Scientology and we learn how his interest was kickstarted. He is especially interested in Free Zone Scientology and what is authentic vs. that which is heretical Scientology. Aled discloses why he feels the need in his work to say that he is not a Scientologist and he talks about how academia can enrich public life and how important it is for a researcher to be in control of their own work. Aled grew up as a video game kid and the first band he was interested in was Queen – it’s in his musical DNA. We learn that he is into retro music, including punk, and that one of his biggest obsessions involves Sparks which, for Aled, are everything t

For this week’s Nostalgia Interview it was fantastic to catch up via Zoom from Abu Dhabi with Christopher Greenfield, one of my best friends from the Bishop of Llandaff Church in Wales High School in Cardiff. Christopher graduated from Cardiff in 1994 with a degree in Astrophysics, taught first aid with St. John Ambulance, became a schoolteacher and was invited to Houston in 1997, where he later became the headteacher of an International Space School and got to interact with the astronauts. Christopher also did a Masters degree there and in 2012 moved to Kuwait and then during the pandemic to Abu Dhabi where he talks about there being a big thirst for knowledge about space. Christopher’s father first got him interested in astronomy, and we learn too about Christopher’s knowledge of the singles charts (we both very much have this in common!), and Christopher talks about his ability to recall them. He also talks about the first record he bought and how he he does online pub quizzes. We learn that Chris

It was a huge pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet up via Zoom with Tamar Jeffers McDonald, an expert on Doris Day. Tamar is Reader in Film and Head of the School of Arts at the University of Kent. We learn that she dropped a copy of her book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood, Sex, and Stardom to Carmel, California, for Doris Day to read and Tamar talks about how a few years ago she bought a broach that Day wore to the 1960 Golden Globes. Tamar discusses how she always imagined that she would have been an academic but in a different discipline and we discover that she used to work for the Victorian Society. We find out that Tamar’s and Doris Day’s families came from the same places in America and we learn how Tamar built up her academic credentials. We talk in detail about Pillow Talk and the question of Doris Day’s character’s alleged virginity, and we move the discussion to the theme of gaslighting. We also discuss the parallel careers – and Manichean opposites – of Day and Marlon B

It was a delight this week via Zoom to meet John Lyden for my latest Nostalgia Interview. John is Blizek Professor of Religion and Film at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has been editor of the Journal of Religion and Film since 2011, a field of study which John has been keen to get people to take seriously. We talk about the importance of interdisciplinarity and how his religion and film work was borne out of his teaching and his hobbies. John was born in Seattle and grew up in Connecticut in the 1960s. We learn that he was raised a Lutheran, wanted to be a scientist at the time of the Apollo programme, and ended up doing a Theology degree due to his own religious questions. He has always loved movies, and his earliest memories include seeing The Music Man. John reflects on how he appreciates pop music from the past more now than he did at the time and we learn that he comes from a musical family. His father was an accountant and had a naval career during the Second World War, and was at Norman

My guest this week is Johanna Stiebert, Professor of Biblical Hebrew at the University of Leeds. The interview took place against the backdrop of Covid 19, and Johanna explains why she has revamped her modules in the light of the events of 2020. The other big event at the time was the US Presidential election, the outcome of which was not known when we recorded the interview, and Johanna talks about her experience of living and teaching in Tennessee in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Johanna has one parent from New Zealand and the other from Germany, and her grandfathers fought on opposite sides during the Second World War. She was born in New Zealand and grew up in Germany. We learn that Johanna went to Cambridge to do a two year MPhil in Biblical Hebrew and then moved to Glasgow which she explains was the best place next to heaven. She taught English in Botswana, which was a life-affirming experience, and was there at the height of the HIV epidemic. Johanna talks about how she then lived in Knoxville an

My guest this week is Penny Bernard who gets to wallow in heritage and nostalgia as part of her job translating archaeology for school audiences. We discover that one silver lining in what has been a challenging year for everybody is that Penny has been able to follow her dream of going to art college. We also learn about her family Tudor dinner party and how she finds that children are better at following Covid guidelines than adults. Penny talks about how her family defines itself by its myths and histories, but she explains why this can be suffocating. She can trace her ancestry back to Somerset, and we learn that she was once kidnapped in Albania. Her earliest memory involves forget-me-nots and a traumatic memory involving wet hair, and she tells me why she thinks memory is an artful lie. Penny talks about what happened when she found her younger diaries and how myopic they could be, and she reflects on how there are dangers with relying on Facebook to tell us what we did in the past when that fu

My guest this week is Stephen Garner who works at Laidlaw College in New Zealand as Academic Dean and Senior Lecturer in Theology. He talks about how the seasons are different between our two countries, and how Christmas, and its attendant nostalgia, fits into this framework. He once celebrated his birthday twice in one year. Stephen works in the areas of technology/new media and bioethics/transhumanism as well as religion and popular culture. He tells us about his interest in collecting film resources – such as by rummaging around second hand stores – from the Pacific, foundational to New Zealand cinema, which are increasingly unavailable. So, he is accumulating physical media that is disappearing from physical memory and has up to 1500 DVDs. We discuss the differences in curating our own movie collection when we are dealing with physical products and how it can’t happen in the same way in a streaming context. The packaging also tells a story of a particular time. Stephen also reflects on the importanc