Dr. Patrick Hamilton of English and Dr. Allan Austin of history are taking their campus radio podcast work to the big-er time: “Their campus pop culture podcast is now streamed on WVIA radio, Northeastern Pennsylvania’s PBS affiliate..
The pair’s new podcast is named “Pop Shop,” with the tagline: “Two professors obsessing about everything popular culture, just like you!”
“The show is basically us talking about movies, television shows, toys and games, and whatever else strikes us as ‘going on’ at the moment in popular culture,” Hamilton said.
In this way, and due to their status as college professors, they plan to thoroughly explore pop culture in a unique and intellectually engaging way.
“In an effort to share what scholars know with a broader audience, we want to open up avenues of communication that may be sealed off with scholars just talking to themselves, and not the public. The podcast is a really terrific opportunity to try and take what we think we know and apply it to pop culture in a way that’s both fun and provocatively interesting,” says Dr. Austin. “That we’re having the opportunity to do this is a real gift, that hopefully we do well with.”
The pair’s break originated in 2019, they said, after they were invited to appear on a WVIA show called ArtScene, hosted and produced by Erica Funke. Funke brings attention to local art and cultural events, sets up related interviews, and gives reviews with heavy commentary on various films, music, and books.
Hamilton and Austin spoke about their book, “All New, All Different?– A History and Examination of our Country’s Attitudes Toward Race and the American Superhero.” They all ended up talking about the podcast and because WVIA was trying to develop its repository of podcasts, Funke suggested they pitch a podcast to WVIA. But COVID-19 got in the way, and the project was shelved.
Undeterred, the duo continued their work on “Even More Mashed Up” in the meantime, although, as may be hinted at by the name, it was not actually their first outing into public discussions. Around 2014, Misericordia’s Mass Communications Department was doing a lot of hands-on work, and Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Austin were asked for an interview by a student interested in the class they co-taught, one that combined teachings on race and comic books to study both history and literature. By the end of the interview, which went much deeper and much longer than the student or their supervisor had anticipated, the student suggested they should set up a radio show on campus. This led to “The Mash Up” on Cougar Radio, which the two hosted. At first it ran for half an hour, then it was lengthened to around an hour. They kept this show running for nearly seven years. When suggestions came in that they should start a podcast to reach more people, “Even More Mashed Up” came to be, and they produced the two at the same time for some time before the time and workload needed to continue each started becoming unsustainable. The current version of the podcast grew from that.
In early 2024, the pair reached out again to WVIA with an official pitch after the company refocused its efforts on the podcast scene. This time, the proposal was accepted.
They are excited to have watched their old, everyday office discussions evolve from their humble roots into widely distributed radio shows and podcasts and are grateful to know that others find value in what they have to say. They know that much of what they talk about at Misericordia may never reach outside ears, so they see this as a great opportunity to share their work. They hope each episode will be just as relaxed as their older discussions would have been, though, taking care not to discuss the topics of each recording session beforehand, hoping for the podcast to feel organic and casual–or, Or, as Dr. Austin put it, “Profoundly unscripted.”
. Their first episode will be a roundup discussing summer movies and streaming service content, and their second episode is covering their thoughts on “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and everything else related to the sequel of the acclaimed 1988 film. An hour-long edit of their podcast will debut on WVIA Radio every Saturday debuting at 6 p.m. A full version of those episodes is also available on various other podcast providers. The pair hopes to make the podcast available on YouTube at some point down the road.