Vance Crowe Podcast 016: Anne M. Stiles Ph.D. The English Professor you wish you had in college

About this episode

Anne Stiles, an associate professor of English at St. Louis University with a Harvard AB and UCLA PhD, joins Vance for what he frames as an accidental save — a promised interview with a personal-injury attorney fell through on a recording failure, so Vance called a friend instead, and the substitute conversation became one of the strongest episodes of the run. Stiles walks through her own academic formation: a self-described "stubborn," small-town Bakersfield kid who talked her way past a skeptical guidance counselor into Harvard, then spent two years catching up academically against classmates from elite prep schools. She explains how graduate school retrains students out of the five-paragraph essay and into sustained argument, and how her dissertation on neurology in late-19th-century Gothic literature emerged from noticing recurring "brain" imagery in mad-scientist novels — a discovery process she compares to archival detective work, tracing how authors like Robert Louis Stevenson likely absorbed real neuroscience case studies published alongside their own fiction in periodicals like Cornhill Magazine. The conversation moves through Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula as products of Victorian anxiety about neuroscience displacing free will and religious authority, then pivots to her current book project on Christian Science and the broader New Thought movement — founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 as a response to genuinely brutal 19th-century medicine (especially for women, who faced rest cures, forced weight gain, and even reproductive surgery for "hysteria"). Stiles traces New Thought's secular descendants forward through Anne of Green Gables, Shirley Temple films, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Rhonda Byrne's 2006 bestseller The Secret, arguing that the underlying appetite — belief that thought alone can control outcomes — never really went away, even as she flags the real-world danger of taking it to extremes: a Christian Scientist father who refused to let his children wear seatbelts because he believed positive thinking alone would prevent accidents, which Stiles calls foolish even by Mary Baker Eddy's own standard. The episode closes on a debate about whether positive thinking is dangerously naive or simply a benign cousin of realist power politics (Machiavelli, international-relations "realism"), landing on Stiles' view that acknowledging real risk and preparing for it is compatible with — not opposed to — a hopeful outlook.

Key moments

• ~5-11%: Stiles describes how graduate school retrains students out of the five-paragraph essay into sustained, book-length argument — and how her own dissertation began as archival detective work tracing "brain" imagery across Gothic mad-scientist novels.
• ~40-48%: Academic peer review as an anonymous, high-stakes gatekeeping institution — Stiles' own small-field candor about half-recognizing anonymous reviewers.
• ~63-72%: The founding of Christian Science by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 as a direct response to brutal 19th-century medicine for women (rest cures, forced weight gain, surgery for "hysteria").
• ~72-84%: New Thought's secular descendants traced forward through Anne of Green Gables, Shirley Temple, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (30 million copies sold).
• ~84%: Vance's candid admission he spent two hours researching Christian Science after the interview to make sure his guest "wasn't a crazy person."
• ~93-97%: The seatbelt story — a Christian Scientist father who refused to let his kids wear seatbelts, believing positive thinking alone prevented accidents, which Stiles calls foolish "even by Mary Baker Eddy's own standard."