It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, January 23, 2022
ACADEMIA Letters The Witch Mark: Hocus Pocus or Evidence for a 17thCentury Epidemic of Lyme Disease?
Mary Drymon [DeRose]
In his eloquently written book The Biography of a Germ, Arno Karlen mused about the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi that causes Lyme disease. He wrote “it is understandable that people failed for a while to identify Lyme disease in all its complexity, but…the bull’s-eye rash of itsrst phase is hard to miss. If Americans did not notice it before the 1970’s, perhaps it wasn't here.”[1] Recent genome studies of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria in America have found that indeed it was circulating in North America before colonial times, was nearly eradicated by the deforestation associated with the spread of agriculture, and then roared back during the twentieth century. Researchers analyzed mutations in the genome of the bacterium that allowed them to trace the evolutionary path that it took. They found ancestral variations ingenetic sequences that suggest it originated in the Northeast and then spread to the Midwest. The Ixodes tick that carries and spreads Lyme disease has been around for millennia. The oldest known case of Lyme disease was found by researchers in the DNA of the five thousand year old ice mummy known as Otzi.
This essay was provoked by my reading a excellent book on Salem by Bernard Rosenthal. The term "possession," as I had noticed in other works on Salem, was used as if there was no ontological or etiological difference from extreme forms of bewitchment. A quick search through the literature indicated that this was a general problem. Accordingly, I trawled through the primary material to find out just how often the distinction arose, and what influence such discussion might have had, First two paragraphs follow below In England, accusations of witchcraft involving extreme psychological symptoms were rare, by comparison with those concerning physical illness. They loom large in the historiography because some cases were publicized and disputed at the time. Such cases rarely extended beyond a single family and one or two accused. Therefore, the events that began at Salem Village, Massachusetts Colony, in the 1690s, leading to accusations in several towns and the series of trials at Salem, are unique in the annals of Anglo-American law. Failing to follow the patterns of interaction seen in ordinary witchcraft cases, they were difficult to explain at the time and have puzzled historians ever since. Historians of New England have fruitfully studied the local context of witchcraft accusations, but there has been less attention to the English religious background or the intellectual context, comparisons usually being drawn between the Salem events and European demonic outbreaks or African possession cults. The European term, "possession," has been applied by anthropologists to phenomena in diverse cultures. When their work is used by historians, the original meaning tends to be obscured. Before drawing cross-cultural comparisons, historians should establish the difference between demonic possession and the effects of witchcraft in English Calvinist thought. It is also necessary to distinguish rigorously between the psychological explanations employed by participants and those used by the historian.
The belief that midwives were commonly persecuted as witches is widespread in the history of witchcraft and the history of medicine. Although the midwife-witch can be found in the writings of some demonologists, influenced by the Malleus Maleficarum, in few of the vast numbers of trials were midwives accused. The practice of midwifery required them to be respectable and trustworthy. Those who dabbled in medicine were occasionally accused but midwives were generally immune from witchcraft prosecution unless they fell foul of a zealous magistrate or there was some special local belief. Historians have been led astray by a tradition that derives from the discredited work of Margaret Murray. A few spectacular cases have been mistaken for a general pattern and midwife-witches have been seen where none exist. The history of witchcraft has been distorted but the history of midwifery has been completely unbalanced by this modern stereotype, which has served either to justify the rise of the men-midwives or to create a multitude of imaginary martyrs for the modern women's health movement. The myth of the midwife-witch is an obstacle to serious study of the history of midwives, women's health and the relationship between popular medicine and religion. The norm, that regular midwives were not prosecuted in ordinary witchcraft cases even if they did get dragged into some of the large-scales panics where any prominent person might be accused, has been generally accepted, though there are dissenters. It therefore becomes possible to identify exceptional cases and explore what made them different, and often highly contentious. It might be useful to explore the records of ordinary ecclesiastical courts and local secular ones, in search of irregular midwives, such as those involved in concealing illegitimate births, or those practising folk medicine and charms. Even though these cases may not have led to full blown witchcraft trials, with the threat of execution, they may well have contributed to the reputation of midwives in general.
“From Goddess to Hag: The Greek and the Roman Witch in Classical Literature” in Dayna Kalleres and Kimberly Stratton, eds. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014 forthcoming) 41-70.
abstraCt. Migdał Justyna, Old Women: divination and Magic or anus in Roman Literature. Word anus was used in a primarily negative sense to describe an old woman. Anus is usually presented as a libidinous and hideous hag who indulges in strong wine or practices black magic, mainly for erotic purposes. Though Latin literature brings as well examples of a different type of anus: goddesses assuming the shape of old women to guide or deceive the mortals and old prophetic women, inspired by the gods. Anus can be gifted with divine powers and secret knowledge. The paper traces the motif of anus as a witch or a divine woman on the basis of selected examples from the works of Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Apuleius and Silius Italicus.
The study of ancient magical female practitioners takes us, unavoidably, into the intersection of gender studies, ancient socio-political discourse and the problem of defining magic in the ancient world. Due to the scarcity of non-literary testimonies about women experts in sorcery, the information about ancient witches has to be inferred from indirect sources, that is, from literature. However, many scholars have rejected the validity of literary portrayals of sorceresses because of the undisputable interference that their gender and magic as a discourse of alterity has on the literary construction of these characters . Obviously, the real women who practiced magic could not "bring down the moon" as the ancient authors claimed but wasthere a real basis behind the ancient stereotypes? Were there actually women who practiced magic for a living? What were the sorceresses of the Greco-Roman world really like? Following an area of research conducted by scholars who accept the existence of a substantial number of magical purveyors of both sexes who offered ritual services of various kinds in the ancient world, my aim in this article is to analyse the literary depiction of ancient witches in contrast with the information offered from direct sources in order to clarify the image of these ancient women. On this occasion, in accordance with the nature of the volume in which this article is published, I will especially focus on those passages in which women appears involved not in the practice of magic, but in the transmission of magical lore in ancient literature with a special mention to the only testimony of PGM in which a woman appears as addresse of the magical knowledge (PGM IV 478-482).
Remembering bell hooks, a Revolutionary Who Led With Love
BARBARA RANSBY bell hooks poses for a portrait on Dec. 16, 1996, in New York City. PHOTO BY KARJEAN LEVINE/GETTY IMAGES
JAN 18, 2022
Ihave known radicals and revolutionaries who love “the people” but whose everyday lives are replete with contradictions. The late bell hooks was by no means perfect, but she was impressively consistent. She took seriously the notion that a revolution had to center love and was as much about transforming ourselves as it was about transforming the world.
I met hooks when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the late 1980s and early ’90s. I have many memories of her, but a Chicago activist now in her 60s shared with me a story that captures her essence. My friend encountered a woman who was a domestic abuse survivor, felt she had no place to turn, and was afraid to leave her abusive situation. She reached out to a number of well-known Black feminists, and hooks was the only one to reply. It was 20-some years ago, and it impacted her deeply. That story proved to me that in every way she could, hooks tried to live her values and politics.
hooks leaves behind an impressive body of dozens of books that offer treatises on societal problems. In her earlier books, such as Killing Rage: Ending Racism, she talked about systems and movements. In her later work, starting with the 1999 book All About Love: New Visions, she focused our attention on the importance of love, community, and self, not as escapist individualistic distractions but as part and parcel of changing the world. We cannot continue to hurt, undermine, and denigrate each other and simultaneously build a better society, she observed.
She insisted we not compromise our definition of freedom.
“Whenever domination is present love is lacking,” she wrote in her 2000 book Feminism is for Everybody. “The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination,” she added, insisting that the personal, including intimate relations, had to be built on an egalitarian foundation of mutual respect. Male-headed patriarchal families were antithetical to that kind of relationship democracy.
But it was not good enough, hooks insisted, to simply declare oneself a feminist. To say “I am” a feminist was not nearly as impactful, she wrote, as saying “I believe in feminism,” because to declare a chosen belief begs the question of how to explain it to others and enact it in community, political, personal, and cultural practice. So, feminism was not merely an identity for hooks but a politic and set of values made meaningful through action.
hooks rejected narrow constructions of single-group or single-issue liberation strategies. To her, they were a dead end. A holistic approach was an intersectional approach, and while she explicitly named White supremacist capitalist patriarchy as the core of the system that needed changing, she was also an environmentalist, a children’s rights advocate, an ally of LGBTQ and disability rights communities. In an essay in her book Belonging: A Culture of Place, hooks writes about environmentalism: “When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. The ancestors taught me it was so.”
It is her big vision that inspired so many people. She insisted we not compromise our definition of freedom. No one should be thrown under the bus, she argued.
Some saw hooks as a bit of a contrarian. But this was one of her virtues, not her vices. She argued and prodded and never agreed for the sake of politeness. “Wait a minute, I don’t think I agree with that,” she would say bluntly. This was not a cause for acrimony but an opportunity for discovery and growth. In this way, her praxis very much resembled that of another Black feminist leader, Ella Baker, whose biography I authored.
hooks viewed struggle, resistance, and reimagining as both collective and intergenerational. Although she is no longer with us on this Earth, we can think of the body of work she left behind, her musings and gentle manifestos, and her nudges and provocations, such as the notion that we are all connected, but we cannot ignore our inequalities, privileges, and vested interests.
Some of those interests we have to consciously divest from: Racial capitalism is as much an obstacle to our full humanity as is racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Climate justice impacts us all, but some people are more vulnerable than others. We have to not replicate hierarchies and elite rankings within oppressed groups. Black millionaires are not a solution to Black poverty. Black cisgender men enjoying the masculine privileges of White men does nothing to liberate Black women, queer folk, or children. Black heterosexuals are only one part of Black life. Black queer and transgender folk have to be centered in our thinking and practice of liberation.
All of these beautifully consistent ideals emerge from hooks’ work, and that is why her mantra of “margin to center” was so powerfully insurgent. Today, hooks’ ideas are widely embraced among progressives—a testament to how effectively she helped us center intersectional radical politics.
hooks will be remembered as a truth teller, an intellectual rabble rouser, a lover of humans and the planet, and a wonderfully difficult woman in the very best sense of that expression.
BARBARA RANSBYteaches at the University of Illinois and is a member of Scholars for Social Justice, the Movement for Black Lives, and Rising Majority. She edits the journal Souls and is the former president of NWSA. She has published widely in popular and scholarly venues: New York Times, Boston Review, The Nation, In These Times, and The Guardian. Dr. Ransby is also the author of three books including, the award-winning biography Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. She is a member of the Society of American Historians, American Studies Association, and National Women's Studies Association. She can be reached at: http://barbararansby.com
Martin Luther King Jr., Labor Activist
One often-overlooked aspect of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and career was his strong support of labor unions, calling them America’s first anti-poverty program.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. surrounded by leaders of the sanitation strike as he arrived to lead a march in support of the striking workers. PHOTO BY BETTMANN / CONTRIBUTOR VIA GETTY IMAGES
If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. still lived, he’d probably tell people to join unions.
King understood that racial equality was inextricably linked to economics. He asked, “What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”
Those disadvantages have persisted. Today, for instance, the wealth of the average White family is more than 20 times that of a Black one.
King’s solution was unionism.
The union newspaper reported that, in his Sept. 21, 1967, address to Local 10, King appealed “for unity between the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement.” Photo from The Dispatcher archives, ILWU. Convergence of Needs
In 1961, King spoke before the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest and most powerful labor organization, to explain why he felt unions were essential to civil rights progress.
“Negroes are almost entirely a working people,” he said. “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.”
ILWU Local 10 represented workers who loaded and unloaded cargo from ships throughout San Francisco Bay’s waterfront. Its members’ commitment to racial equality may be as surprising as it is unknown.
In 1967, the year before his murder, King visited ILWU Local 10 to see what interracial unionism looked like. King met with these unionists at their hall in a then-thriving, portside neighborhood—now a gentrified tourist area best known for Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 39.
While King knew about this union, ILWU history isn’t widely known off the waterfront.
Marching in the West Coast Waterfront Strike of 1934.
Dockworkers had suffered for decades from a hiring system compared to a “slave auction.” Once hired, they routinely worked 24- to 36-hour shifts, experienced among the highest rates of injury and death of any job, and endured abusive bosses. And they did so for incredibly low wages.
In the throes of the Great Depression, these increasingly militant and radicalized dockworkers walked off the job. After 83 days on strike, they won a huge victory: wage increases, a coastwide contract, and union-controlled hiring halls.
Soon, these “wharf rats,” among the region’s poorest and most exploited workers, became “lords of the docks,” commanding the highest wages and best conditions of any blue-collar worker in the region. At its inception, Local 10’s membership was 99% White. But Harry Bridges, the union’s charismatic leader, joined with fellow union radicals to commit to racial equality in its ranks.
Originally from Australia, Bridges started working on the San Francisco waterfront in the early 1920s. It was during the Big Strike that he emerged as a leader.
Bridges coordinated during the strike with C.L. Dellums, the leading Black unionist in the Bay Area, and made sure the handful of Black dockworkers would not cross picket lines as replacement workers. Bridges promised they would get a fair deal in the new union. One of the union’s first moves after the strike was integrating work gangs that previously had been segregated.
Local 10 Overcame Pervasive Discrimination
Cleophas Williams, a Black man originally from Arkansas, was among those who got into Local 10 in 1944. He belonged to a wave of African Americans who, due to the massive labor shortage caused by World War II, fled the racism and discriminatory laws of the Jim Crow South for better lives—and better jobs—outside of it. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks moved to the Bay Area, and tens of thousands found jobs in the booming shipbuilding industry.
Black workers in shipbuilding experienced pervasive discrimination. Employers shunted them off into less attractive jobs and paid them less. Similarly, the main shipbuilders’ union proved hostile to Black workers, who, when allowed in, were placed in segregated locals.
A few thousand Black men, including Williams, were hired as longshoremen during the war. Williams later recalled to historian Harvey Schwartz: “When I first came on the waterfront, many Black workers felt that Local 10 was a utopia.”
During the war, when White foremen and military officers hurled racist epithets at Black longshoremen, this union defended them. Black members received equal pay and were dispatched the same as all others.
A gang of welders at the Marinship yard, Sausalito, California, around 1943. Photo from National Park Service.
For Williams, this union was a revelation. Literally the first White people he ever met who opposed White supremacy belonged to Local 10. These longshoremen were not simply anti-racists, they were communists and socialists.
Leftist unions like the ILWU embraced Black workers because, reflecting their ideology, they contended workers were stronger when united. They also knew that, countless times, employers had broken strikes and destroyed unions by playing workers of different ethnicities, genders, nationalities, and races against each other. For instance, when 350,000 workers went out during the mammoth Steel Strike of 1919, employers brought in tens of thousands of African Americans to work as replacements.
Some Black dockworkers also were socialists. Paul Robeson, the globally famous singer, actor, and left-wing activist, had several friends, fellow socialists, in Local 10. Robeson was made an honorary ILWU member during WWII.
King speaks at Local 10 in San Francisco, September 1967. Photo from ILWU Archives (author-provided).
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Union Member
In 1967, King walked in Robeson’s footsteps when he was inducted into Local 10 as an honorary member, the same year Williams became the first Black person elected president of Local 10. By that year, roughly half its members were African American.
King addressed these dockworkers, declaring, “I don’t feel like a stranger here in the midst of the ILWU. We have been strengthened and energized by the support you have given to our struggles. … We’ve learned from labor the meaning of power.”
Many years later, Williams discussed King’s speech with me: “He talked about the economics of discrimination. … What he said is what Bridges had been saying all along,” about workers benefiting by attacking racism and forming interracial unions.
The day after his death, longshoremen shut down the ports of San Francisco and Oakland, as they still do when one of their own dies on the job. Nine ILWU members attended King’s funeral in Atlanta, including Bridges and Williams, honoring the man who called unions “the first anti-poverty program.” This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been published here with permission.
PETER COLE is the author of "Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area* and Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. Peter writes on labor, race, and politics from both a historical and contemporary perspective for online and print media.
How Scholars Are Countering Well-Funded Attacks on Critical Race Theory
There is a long history of right-wing forces fighting against progressive educational curricula. Now, scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley are working to level the playing field against the moneyed political interests behind the attacks.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History.
Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in mid-December, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced new legislation that allows parents to sue schools for teaching critical race theory. “You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,” said DeSantis, a political ringleader in the latest chapter of the United States’ culture war. In using a quote from Dr. King to justify an attack on curricula that uplifts racial justice, the Republican governor inadvertently created a strong case for why critical thinking on the history of race and racism in the U.S. is necessary.
History professor Robin D. G. Kelley is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains that he “came into the profession at the height of a battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political correctness.” And although he’s lived through decades of conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the 2020s as “dangerous times.”
The Origins of CRT
Kelley sees right-wing attacks on CRT—what he considers an umbrella term for the teaching of “any kind of revisionist or multicultural history”—as a measure of the success communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.
The most recent movement for such education can be traced to the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View, “were intended to counter the ‘sharecropper education’ received by so many African Americans and poor whites.” In a civil rights history lesson created for Teaching for Change, Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40 such schools centered on “a progressive curriculum … designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf.” In 1968, after months of pressure from student activists, San Francisco State University established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.
A movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such education is now standard fare as part of required college courses. California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education, becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to require high schoolers to enroll in ethnic studies courses in order to graduate.
Leading African American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, coined the term “critical race theory” and co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to define race as a social construct and provide a framework for understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in a New York Times article that CRT, originally used by academics and social scientists to analyze educational inequities, “is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced … the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”
Understanding the Attacks on CRT
Critical race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the form of multi-pronged legislative restrictions and even bans, as well as firings of teachers accused of teaching biased histories.
Kelley sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate any education that actually reckons with the history of American slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity. Reflecting again on the ’80s, he says the attacks on ethnic studies, culture, and race didn’t only come from the Right. “In fact,” he says, they also came from “liberals, from the Left,” and from those saying “we’re not paying enough attention to class [struggles].”
Kelley cites “classic liberal fatigue” against ongoing demands for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, “We already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation, what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?”
A case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing war on CRT is a new venture called the University of Austin, Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an op-ed in the Times, cited unpopular ideas, such as “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” She expressed dismay that such an opinion—generally considered a racist one—is shunned by many academics.
To counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATX’s founders say they are devoted to “the unfettered pursuit of truth” and are promoting a curriculum that will include the “Forbidden Courses” centering on “the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”
As if to underscore Kelley’s warning about liberals joining the right-wing culture war, the nascent university’s board of advisors includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
A Counter to the Moneyed Interests Backing CRT Attacks
Kelley sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness and those centered on CRT today. “The Right has far more political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and passing legislation on what’s called critical race theory,” he says.
Right-wing narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a grassroots effort led by parents concerned about bias in their children’s education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work behind the scenes. The watchdog group Open Secrets recently exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part of “a network of established dark money groups funded by secret donors … stoking the purportedly ‘organic’ anti-CRT sentiment.”
Additionally, CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz exposed how “business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped fund attacks” on CRT and that it is expected to be a centerpiece of the GOP’s campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
In contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed in opposition to CRT, the Marguerite Casey Foundation each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like Kelley, to counter “the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements.”
The Foundation chose six scholars whom it describes as doing “leading research in critical fields.” Those include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are anathema to anti-CRT forces.
Kelley, who was named one of the foundation’s 2021 Freedom Scholars, agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge White supremacist and patriarchal histories.
Going beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social justice movements that are thriving. “We’re beginning to break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power, [which] begets radical feminism,” says Kelley, citing grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past 50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention, such as the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Boggs Center, the Combahee River Collective, The Red Nation, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. “Just in the last two decades, we’re seeing so many amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak,” says Kelley.
He is heartened by what he calls “new scholarship” that is “thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers,” giving way instead to the “political and intellectual work of those who have a different vision of the future.”
SONALI KOLHATKARis currently the racial justice editor at YES! Media and a writing fellow with Independent Media Institute. She was previously a weekly columnist for Truthdig.com. She is also the host and creator of Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. Sonali won First Place at the Los Angeles Press Club Annual Awards for Best Election Commentary in 2016. She also won numerous awards including Best TV Anchor from the LA Press Club and has also been nominated as Best Radio Anchor 4 years in a row. She is the author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence, and the co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women's Mission. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She reflects on her professional path in her 2014 TEDx talk, “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host.” She can be reached at sonalikolhatkar.com
