The Black Studies Podcast

This is Brie Gorrell and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Dr. Willie Jamaal Wright who is a Research Fellow within the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include the study of urban and black geographies throughout the Black Diaspora. His writing has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the Black Scholar, City & Society and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Urban Studies Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. He is currently co-editing the late geographer, Bobby M. Wilson’s Consumer Political Economy and African America for the University of Georgia Press. Lastly, Dr. Wright is working on his first sole-authored text, Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in the Houston's Third Ward. In this conversation, we discuss black geographies as emerging field in black studies, black studies as life studies, as well as a place of refuge for black students.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Mark Sanders, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and English at University of Notre Dame. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles on African American and Afro-Caribbean literature and culture, as well as author, editor, and translator of three books, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown (1999), Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell from 2007) and A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence (2010). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational study, language diversity in the Black Americas, and the fecundity of Black Studies critical frames for the study of literature and culture.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's conversation is with Jocelyn Brown, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Ohio University with training in gerontology, applied sociology, and applied psychology. Originally from West Virginia, her scholarship centers Black Appalachian life across the life course. She has a particular focus on health disparities, structural racism, and the political-economic conditions shaping Black communities in Appalachia, the wider U.S., and the African diaspora.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's conversation is with Drew D. Brown, Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Florida, specializing in the intersections of Black Culture and Sports. His current book manuscript explores “Baller Culture,” the hip-hop-informed Black cultural expression found in sports. Analyzing sports media from 1988 to 2008, he argues that film, magazines, and commercials became a public arena where young Black Americans negotiated their cultural expression to shape and reshape identities, build community, and gain popularity. The book shows how they deployed a hybrid identity, which was often commodified and misrepresented by the media. Ultimately, the book highlights the constantly evolving nature of Black cultural identity.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Nneka Dennie, who teaches in the Department of History at Washington and Lee University. She has published on early African-American thought and history, with particular attention to the work of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and is the author and editor of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (2023) and the in-progress book Redefining Radicalism: Black Women Intellectuals in the Nineteenth Century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of historical and cultural research in the field of Black Studies, the place of gender in work on the African American intellectual tradition, and the urgency of the study of Black radical thought in our contemporary moment.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Andrea Mays, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of New Mexico. She has written extensively in public facing venues and has authored scholarly essays that draw on the history of Black art and what it has to say about resistance, refusal, and culture making in an antiblack world. Her work focuses on African American Visual Culture and Black Atlantic Culture and Politics, Afrofuturism, and Black Feminist Studies. Her research interests include Black Atlantic expressions of critical and resistance politics. Mays’ forthcoming essay “Legacies of Wisdom: The Praxis of Teaching Butler’s Visions of Apocalypse During Apocalyptic Times” will be included in a collection titled, Authority in the Speculative Fiction Classroom due out in 2026. Mays’ public scholarship includes essays and articles published in USA Today, The Albuquerque Journal, The Santa Fe Reporter, IKON Feminisms Digital Archive, and the Morgan State University Global Journalism Review. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of art and culture, new horizons of documenting everyday Black life, and the task of cultivating and sustaining the legacy of Black Studies in a politically fraught world.