Brenda E. Stevenson - Department of African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 Brenda E. Stevenson, Professor of African American Studies and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of a number of important scholarly articles and has written and edited several important books: Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1997), The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots, (2013)  What is Slavery? (2015), What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?: A History of the Enslaved Black Family (2023), and was the critical editor of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, published in 1989. In this conversation, we discuss her place in the field of Black Studies, how historical research enhances the study of Black life, and how Black Studies methodologies and sensibilities impact the study and writing of history.