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In spring 2019, doctoral candidates Kacey Calahane and Max Speare partnered with Dr. Jessica Millward, associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, to create the Historians on Housewives (#HonH) podcast. We envisioned this project as a multi-platform and interdisciplinary endeavor to make scholars accessible to a broad public audience and to help them communicate their work in ways that transcend the academy, using reality television as the primary subject and medium. Our podcast brings together scholars from across the academy to use the pop cultural phenomenon of The Real Housewives reality television show as a vehicle to explore questions about United States and world history and interdisciplinary methods of research. Historians on Housewives and guests on the podcast interrogate characters and episode story arcs to contextualize academic history for a public audience using BravoTV's vast catalogue, including non-Housewives programming, as an archive. Launched in August of 2019, the first season tackled a broad spectrum of subjects, including slavery; segregation; the politics of fashion and identity formation; wealth accumulation and branding; publishing; colonialism; immigration; historical memory; oral history; genocide; adolescence; feminism; motherhood; fertility; divorce; and domestic violence.1
The #HonH project demonstrates how scholars can use the podcast to interact with the public in culturally relevant and accessible ways while also providing new avenues for student engagement and alternative career paths for graduate students. The #HonH project also bridges these conversations beyond listening to the podcast by engaging with social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to contextualize—with the help of academic books and articles—the popular culture consumed by the public each day.
On every episode, guests, who are largely academics, join #HonH and use Bravo's most memorable moments to contextualize their scholarship. We have asked, for example, what does it mean that a broad public found solace in the plasticity and vanity of Orange County, California in the midst of the 2008 market crash? How has the category of "housewife" been destabilized, not just historically, but across the franchises? What does it mean to be a housewife in Atlanta, Orange County, Beverly Hills, Dallas, Miami, Washington, DC, Potomac, New Jersey, New York, and Melbourne? To what degree are these different experiences not just captured but also consumed? Can the Real...