About W&L After Class, the Lifelong Learning Podcast
Your curiosity doesn’t end when you receive your diploma. Washington and Lee’s Office of Lifelong Learning is here to help you explore the many questions that a good education stirs. In every episode, we’ll invite you to join conversations with our expert faculty, giving you another walk down the Colonnade even if you’re hundreds of miles away. You’ll hear from favorite faculty members about topics they know and love and meet new professors who can introduce you to new worlds; it all happens here on W&L After Class, where we invite you to join the kinds of discussions that happen after class every day at W&L. Indeed, curiosity remains not unmindful of the future.
What Is, Is Beautiful: Poetry and Attention with Leah Naomi Green
In this episode, we sit down with Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Environmental Studies Leah Naomi Green to continue this season’s central question: What is beauty? Approaching the question through poetry, ecology, and lived experience, Green reflects on beauty as a practice of attention rather than an attribute of prettiness. Drawing from her life as a poet, teacher, and homesteader, she explores how intimacy with language, place, and responsibility shapes how we perceive the world. Throughout the conversation, Green and host James Lambert discuss poetry’s power to defamiliarize the familiar, to help us feel rather than merely think, and to reconnect us to both human and more-than-human communities. Including readings from poets like Gregory Orr and Galway Kinnell, as well as excerpts from Green’s own work, the episode invites listeners to consider beauty as something we cultivate — through care, naming, and presence — in classrooms, landscapes, and everyday life.
15 Jan 2026
What Is Beauty?: Aesthetics, Attention, and Shared Humanity with Angela Sun
In this episode, we sit down with Assistant Professor of Philosophy Angela Sun to explore the question at the heart of this season: “What is beauty?” Through reflections on philosophy, music, art and everyday life, Sun challenges the idea that beauty is merely subjective, inviting us instead to see it as a shared human practice shaped by attention, openness and community. She discusses how aesthetic commitments — from punk music and Taylor Swift to knitting and film — help shape our identities over time, and why education and curiosity are essential to recognizing beauty in unexpected places. This conversation offers a thoughtful reminder that beauty is not only something we admire but something we learn to see together.
9 Sept 2025
The Serendipity of Learning: Openness, Opportunity, and the Liberal Arts with Provost Lena Hill
In this episode, we sit down with Provost Lena Hill, whose vision and leadership maintain the best of the liberal arts education at Washington and Lee. For Hill, education is not only about mastery of a discipline but also about discovery, openness, and the courage to embrace the unexpected. She reflects on her own journey, from studying Renaissance art in Florence to becoming an internationally recognized scholar of Ralph Ellison, and how those formative experiences shape the way she thinks about curriculum, faculty, and students today. From the evolving role of general education to the transformative impact of study abroad, research, and mentoring, Hill shares how W&L empowers students to unlock their potential and pursue lives of meaning. Whether you’re an alum curious about the university’s future, a student navigating your own path, or a lifelong learner seeking inspiration, this conversation offers a thoughtful reminder that education is both an opportunity and a gift.
Reach and audience
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
14 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 28 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
25
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
77
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