David Kalonji Walton - Department of History and African American Studies, Lincoln University

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 David Kalonji Walton, who teaches in the Departments of History and African American Studies at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is the author of a number of popular and scholarly pieces on African American history and politics and is a regular contributor to media outlets on issues concerning the past, present, and future of Black people. In this conversation, we discuss the details of what makes Black Studies a unique form of inquiry, the relationship of historical materials and theory while teaching in the field, and the extensive presence of Black Studies content in popular and intellectual culture.