Podcast

introduction

Welcome to our podcast series, "Curiosity Never Retires."  This podcast is the result of a collaboration by Paul Vamvas, Andrew Hiller, and David Flaxman, with the technical assistance of Jesse Williams. By celebrating the diverse experiences and interests of the Study Group Leaders and members who make up OLLI at American University, this podcast’s goal is to provide information about the wonderful courses and people at the heart of our OLLI at AU, while sparking curiosity and maybe a conversation or two. Initially, we plan to record short podcasts (roughly 13 to 15 minutes in length) in which a course instructor is interviewed about an upcoming course. This will enable our members to get a bit of insight into what the course will offer before registering.  But it will also serve as an introduction to that instructor in general. We plan to have links in the online catalog to these podcasts where appropriate and available. In the future, we may expand the podcast in other directions to help us spotlight exciting aspects of our OLLI. We at "CNR" believe there’s never a good time to stop learning or laughing.

PRODUCTION

Three individuals collaborated to produce this new OLLI at AU podcast venture, "Curiosity Never Retires." We are extremely grateful for the time, energy, and talent that this group has provided to bring this project to life.  

Paul Vamvas retired in 2019 after 20 years with the Federal Judicial Center where he produced educational programs for federal judges. He has a JD degree from the University of Maryland School of Law and an LLM focused on constitutional law from the Georgetown Law Center.

In his twenty years on air, Andrew Hiller has worked with everyone from NPR to the World Bank and the Jim Henson gang. His science, health, and tech news magazine the Prism, was broadcast in fifty-three countries, and his commentaries have been selected as best of the year four times by WAMU 88.5 FM. Outside of journalism, Andrew's plays have graced the New York stage, and his novels have twice hit the Amazon Bestseller list. His latest effort, Hornytown Chutzpah, will hit the shelves in March 2026.

David Flaxman is a musician and computer scientist who has been teaching classes at OLLI since 2017. His music classes have previously covered Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and others. He is president of the City Choir of Washington and the Georgetown Chorale and is a co-founder of the Washington Douglass Chorale.

podcasts

 
David Flaxman, Mozart
David Flaxman is a musician and computer scientist who has been teaching classes at OLLI since 2017. His music classes have previously covered Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and others. He is president of the City Choir of Washington and the Georgetown Chorale and is a co-founder of the Washington Douglass Chorale.

 

Howard Spendelow, China & Japan
Howard Spendelow earned a BA in government (1966) from Oberlin College, and an MA in Chinese Regional Studies (1970) and PhD in history and East Asian languages (1982) from Harvard University. He taught history at Georgetown University from 1979 to 2023, and from 1980 to 2014 he also served as Contract Chair of the Advanced Area Studies Seminar on China at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.