Season 6, Episode 3: Making KIN

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we visit KIN: Us and Our Kinds, an exhibit of paintings, comics, and sculpture by historian and artist Rafael Neis, and ask what happens when creative practice becomes a way of doing history. Drawing on ancient rabbinic stories, KIN explored how kinship, species, and bodies were once imagined as unstable and open to change. We talk with Neis about bringing art and scholarship together, teaching history through hands-on experiments, the medical history of classifying bodies, and how discomfort in front of art can start conversations.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we visit KIN: Us and Our Kinds, an exhibit of paintings, comics, and sculpture by historian and artist Rafael Neis, and ask what happens when creative practice becomes a way of doing history. Drawing on ancient rabbinic stories, KIN explored how kinship, species, and bodies were once imagined as unstable and open to change. We talk with Neis about bringing art and scholarship together, teaching history through hands-on experiments, the medical history of classifying bodies, and how discomfort in front of art can start conversations.

Rafael Neis is Hermann P. & Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Neis is the author of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023). Cheyenne Pettit received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now Assistant Professor of History at Missouri Southern State University.

View the full episode transcript.

Production Credits

Episode Producers: Cheyenne Pettit

Season Producer: Cheyenne Pettit

Executive Producer: Joseph W. Ho

Editorial Board: Joseph W. Ho, Kenneth Mills, Gregory Parker

Music: Eguana, “Wind In Wheat Fields” (Endless Quest Media)

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