Will Don and Betty ever reunite as lovers? Where will Peggy’s career take her? Can Sally survive her adolescence? We’ve all been there, deliciously obsessing over the captivating characters and enthralling storylines of Mad Men. And we’re not alone. Some of America’s leading scholars are right there with us, parsing Matthew Weiner’s iconic world and probing its intricacies—the sartorial stylings and cocktail culture, the civil rights movement and women’s lib all among them. It might just be the most resonant narrative created in our time. That’s certainly what Lauren Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert Rushing think. The three University of Illinois professors just edited Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, the first academic study of the show to be published by a university press. Join them and WBEZ's Alison Cuddy on our sofa, drinks in hand, as they share their passion for Mad Men and prime us for the new season.
This program is presented in partnership with Time Out Chicago, The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
