Trio of faculty air expertise on With Good Reason

Radford University Professor of History Matthew Oyos, Ph.D., will be a guest on the “With Good Reason” public radio program to talk about how President Theodore Roosevelt transformed and modernized the United States military to accommodate America’s growing interests around the world.

It is a familiar topic for Oyos, whose 2019 book “In Command: Theodore Roosevelt and the American Military” delves into the president’s impact on the U.S. armed forces.

Oyos’ interview will air October 31 - November 6 on more than 60 radio stations across the United States. Listeners in the New River Valley can hear the professor’s interview at 6 p.m., Tuesday, November 3, on Public Radio WVRU 89.9.

Programs also are available as podcasts at withgoodreasonradio.org.

Also available on “With Good Reason” podcasts are interviews with Radford University faculty members Aysha Bodenhamer ’10, Ph.D., and Molly Hood.

In an interview that originally aired early in October, Bodenhamer, an assistant professor of sociology, spoke about the substantial resurgence of black lung disease in central Appalachia after being nearly eradicated.

Much of Bodenhamer’s research centers on black lung’s reappearance among the region’s coal miners and examines the coal industry’s impact on workers, communities and the environment.

In September, Hood, an assistant professor of theatre, spoke on “With Good Reason” about her role in helping create “Performing History: Women and the Vote.” This online theatrical work explores the women’s suffrage movement in the United States on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment ratification. Hood and her students worked along with Amanda Nelson, associate professor of theatre at Virginia Tech, and a group of Virginia Tech students to create the original dramatic work.

The theatrical work was scheduled to be a live performance at the Alexander Black House in Blacksburg, Virginia. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, forced Hood, Nelson and their students to move the performance online.

“The result was a special performance website, where the audience, now website visitors, could explore a Victorian home, clicking on objects in the house to view recorded student performances of imagined suffrage stories,” Hood explained.

The “With Good Reason” radio program is produced by Virginia Humanities for the Virginia Higher Education Broadcasting Consortium, which comprises all of Virginia’s public colleges and universities.

The award-winning program is heard by an estimated 100,000 people each week on public radio stations in 33 states, including Virginia and Washington, D.C. Thousands more download the episodes via iTunes.