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.

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 Tikia Hamilton, who teaches in the Department of History at Loyola University of Chicago. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of Nothing Less Than Equality: The Battle Over Segregated Education in the Nation's Capital, published in March 2026. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of writing the history of Black life, the centrality of questions of education in Black study, and how Black Studies informs her research questions, sources, and approach to writing.

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 Sam Tecle, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research engages with Black and diaspora studies, Urban studies, and sociology of education with particular focus on the analysis of diverse experiences, trajectories and expressions of Blackness grounded in particular histories of racialization, colonialism, community formation and resistance. In this conversation, we discuss the early formative history of Black Studies in Canada, the roots of Black study epistemologies in everyday practice, and the complexity of diverse stories of blackness for the Black Studies imagination.

Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2026) and At the Margins of Nihilism (2026). He is also the co-editor with Michael Sawyer of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and co-host of both The Black Studies Podcast and Conversations in Atlantic Theory.In today’s conversation, we explore John Drabinski’s three latest monographs. In Atlantic Theory, he traces the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism while offering a comparative account of critical thought across the Atlantic world. In So Unimaginable a Price, he turns to James Baldwin, situating his work within a broader mid-century Atlantic context and placing it in dialogue with thinkers across the Caribbean and Africa.Finally, in At the Margins of Nihilism, he develops a theoretical framework through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson, drawing on figures such as Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Baldwin to examine how different forms of nihilism operate as closed systems, and how they are unsettled through vernacular practices of life and refusal.

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 Bryce Henson, a critical interpretive social scientist who specializes in Black diasporic cultural studies. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism with affiliations in Africana Studies and the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University. In 2016, he received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research with a Latin American & Caribbean Studies graduate minor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil examines how the Black hip-hop community in Salvador da Bahia constructs the quilombo (maroon) in urban contexts as a mode of fostering and protecting Black life. The book earned three awards from the National Communication Association and honorable mention for Best Book Prize from the Brazilian Studies Association. He is also a co-editor of the 2020 volume, Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization. Previously, he was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He now serves on the advisory board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).

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 RA Judy, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a number of important articles on aesthetics, language, and knowledge production in the broad Black intellectual tradition as well as two books, (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992) and Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (2020). In this conversation, we explore the place of diverse languages in Black Studies research, Black study as geographically adventurous, and the importance of thinking and practicing community work inside critical theoretical study.

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 Justene Hill Edwards, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (Norton, 2024) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021). A specialist in African American history, her research examines Black economic life in America. She has been awarded several fellowships and awards, most recently the 2025 Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction and the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. She is a series editor for the History of U.S. Capitalism Series at Columbia University Press.

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 Tyler D. Parry, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Disapora Studies at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of a number of scholarly and public-facing essays, and has published Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (2020) and, with Robert Greene II, Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (2021). In this conversation, we explore the importance of regional attentiveness in writing Black history in the United States, thinking blackness in the southwest, and the expansiveness of the Black Studies archive and imagination.

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 Kathryn Sophia Belle, philosopher, published author, and public speaker. After earning her doctorate in philosophy, she had a successful 20-year career in academia (2003-2023) before resigning/retiring as a tenured associate professor (of philosophy, Black Studies, and Women's Studies) and administrator (directing an Africana Research Center). Her scholarly specializations include African American/Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, Continental Philosophy/Existentialism, and Social/Political Philosophy. She is author of Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014, also in French: Éditions Kimé, 2023). She is also co-editor of Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010). Her current writing projects include a book on the philosophy of Audre Lorde (under contract with Yale University Press) and her own memoir trilogy (Marriage/Motherhood/Erotic Empowerment). Dr. Belle is founder of La Belle Vie Academy with signature programs: La Belle Vie Writers and Exit Strategies, Happily Unmarried and Erotic Empowerment. Dr. Belle is now channeling her 20-years of experience and expertise in academia and La Belle Vie Academy with a new venture: Belle's Bed & Breakfast/Boutique Hotel - a continuation and extension of her overall vision. She is delighted to call Savannah, GA her chosen and spiritual home – ever grateful to be in beloved community.

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 Vanessa K. Valdés, a writer and scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, performances, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She served as a professor at The City College for New York for 14 years, from 2007-2021, earning the rank of full professor, before being named the Dean of the Macaulay Honors College (2021-2022), then returning to City College as the Associate Provost for Community Engagement. Beginning in 2025, she was named the Editor of CENTRO Press, the book-making arm of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is the author of Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017), namesake of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. She is the editor of Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012); The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012); Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020); and, with Earl Fitz, Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas (2024). From 2021-2023, along with David Pullins, she co-curated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue, published in 2023. With Diasporic Blackness, she began a long-standing relationship with the Schomburg Center; she currently serves on its Centennial Advisory Board, and is co-editor, with Barrye Brown and Laura Helton, of a new book, Black Studies on 135th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection, coming in April 2026. In addition to her role at CENTRO Press, she is on the advisory board of Callaloo and Small Axe, and is the series editor of the Afro-Latinx Futures series at the State University of New York Press and a series co-editor, along with Nathan Dize and Annette Joseph-Gabriel, of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press. You can learn more about her by visiting her website https://drvkv23.com/ or following her on Instagram - @drvkv23.

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 Bianca Beauchemin, who teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her work seeks to disrupt the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, exploring how embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance, and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. In this conversation, we explore the particularities of Black Studies in a Canadian context, the place of gender and sexuality studies in work of Black study, and the complexity of thinking Canadian blackness.

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 Marlee S. Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and author whose work centers oral histories of Black educators, African American educational history, and culturally responsive teaching and leadership. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Bunch has over a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary contexts and has held leadership roles in curriculum development, educator preparation, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she also created two state-approved micro-credentials—one based on The Magnitude of Us and the other on Unlearning the Hush, designed to support educators’ culturally responsive practice through sustained, reflective learning.Dr. Bunch is the author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press), which received the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research, Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge).

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 Ashon Crawley, who teaches in the Departments of Religious Studies and of African American Studies at University of Virginia. Along with his numerous scholarly essays and books Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016) and The Lonely Letters (2020), he is a widely exhibited and hosted multimedia artist. In this conversation, we explore the aesthetic and epistemological resonance of religious practice in Black study, the pleasures of adventurous multidisciplinary research, and the open horizons of pedagogical practice in the Black Studies tradition.

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 Tashal Brown, assistant professor of Urban Education and Secondary Social Studies in the College of Education at University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender in relation to equity and justice in educational contexts and how the cultivation and enactment of critical literacies and liberatory pedagogies across K–12 schools, community-based spaces, and teacher education shape the perspectives, experiences, and actions of youth and educators. In this conversation, we explore the centrality of the study of childhood in Black Studies, the place of education in the field, and the transformative power of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Black girlhood.

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 Hanna Garth, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, and was previously Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. She held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA, an MPH in Global Health from Boston University, and a BA from Rice University. She is a food anthropologist, broadly focused on how individuals and families navigate food systems in the service of their desires to eat in particular, culturally inflected ways. With critical attention to the granular, everyday experiences of navigating broader systems, her work links macro-scale structures to social and material impacts on life conditions. Her research asks questions like beyond our basic needs for survival, what does it take to live a decent life, and who gets to decide? Her work critically analyzes concepts like justice, interrogating how justice is understood and by whom it is defined? She interrogates concepts like food sovereignty and its possibilities in our contemporary globalized world. She is interested in how people build and maintain community and support networks within broader contexts of inequality and struggles for survival. She studies these issues in Latin America and the Caribbean and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. |

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 Kimberly Blockett, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Delaware. Along with a number of scholarly articles in prominent journals, she has compiled the heavily annotated edition Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experiences, Ministerial Travels, and Labour’s of Mrs. Elaw (2021), edited the collection Mapping Black Women’s Geographies (2025), and the author of Race, Religion, and Rebellion: The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw (fall 2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of recovering lost voices in a multidisciplinary approach to history, the place of religion in Black study, and the exciting, productive, and imaginative messiness of Black Studies research.

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 Antoine Williams, a multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of drawing in the expanded field in the School of Art and Art History at University of Florida. His work has been exhibited across the United States and he’s held numerous fellowships and residencies in the arts.His interactive, multimedia, site-specific installation with Josiah Golson titled “Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right” is being exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art through early-July 2026. In this conversation, we discuss roots of his concern with Black life, the relationship between study and creative production, and the place of the arts in the Black Studies project.

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 Angela Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard-Columbia. She studies the political economy of suburban Black middle-class suburbs, and her forthcoming book Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage, February 2026) asks why majority-Black suburbs that work hard to build stable, thriving communities still face financial barriers that make this harder than it is for their white counterparts.

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 Robert Bland, who teaches in the Departments of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. My research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory.His latest book - Requieum for Reconstruction Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation - examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. It explores the efforts of black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed Compromise of 1877. In doing so, he illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, local schools, and representations of Gullah folklore and the simultaneous debate in the national black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order.

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 Kimberly Thomas McNair, who teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She teaches widely in literature, gender studies, and cultural studies inside the Black Studies tradition and is completing a book manuscript entitled Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: T-Shirt Culture and the Black Activist Tradition.In this conversation, we discuss the unique character of Black Studies, relations of disciplines to the non-disciplinary character of the field, and the intersection of politics, memory, and cultural studies in the history of Black social activism.

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 Dr. Ronald Zeigler, former director of Nyumburu Cultural Center for 25 years; colleague who worked as adjuncted in the African American and Africana Studies Department integral part of the Black community on campus for 47 years.

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 Deborah Gray White, an emeritus Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is author of Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994; several K-12 textbooks on United States History, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860. In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of black women into the modern historical profession and the development of the field of black women’s history. Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored college text, is in its third edition. As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C, and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March. She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history, and in 2019 was awarded the Stephen A. Ambrose Oral History Award. From 2016-2021 she co-directed the “Scarlet and Black Project” which investigated Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University and is co-editor of the three-part Scarlet and Black series that explores this history. In 2024, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History awarded her its Living Legacy Award for her work in establishing the field of African American women’s history. She is currently at work on an autobiography, tentatively titled “Winning Against Ugly: A Black Historian’s Tale of Love, Loss, and the Historical Profession.”

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 Paul C. Taylor, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on philosophy and the question of race, he is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2003), On Obama (2015), and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is currently at work on two book-length projects: Dark Futures and Uneasy Sanctuary: Rethinking Race-Thinking.In this conversation, we discuss the place of philosophical thinking in the study of Black life, critical theory as a form of Black study, and the intersection of aesthetic questions and critical theories of race in the field of Black Studies.

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 Joanna Davis-McElligatt, who teaches in the Department of English at University of North Texas. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on literature and graphic arts, she is the author of the forthcoming Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora (2026).In this conversation, we discuss the place of the Black literary tradition in the study of Black life, disciplinary limits and possibilities, and how comics, graphic arts, and aesthetic questions they raise expand the Black Studies imagination.

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 Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009) Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990, 2nd ed. 2015); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002, New Ed. 2020); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (Free Press 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); and forthcoming Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt, 2026). He also co-edited (with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor), Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies (2023); (with Jesse Benjamin), Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (2018); (with Stephen Tuck) The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015); (with Franklin Rosemont) Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (2009); (with Earl Lewis) To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (2000); and (with Sidney J. Lemelle), Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1995). Kelley’s articles and essays have appeared in dozens of several anthologies, journals, and magazines, including Hammer and Hope; American Quarterly; African Studies Review; Journal of American History; New Labor Forum; The Nation; New York Times; New York Review of Books; Radical History Review; Transition; Black Scholar; Dissent; Rethinking Marxism; Black Music Research Journal; Callaloo; Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir; and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.

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 Clarissa Myrick-Harris White, PhD, who is a tenured full Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and History at Morehouse College. She leads the college's Movement, Memory, and Justice Project and was co-founder of the Morehouse Black Men's Research Institute. Previously she served as Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Associate Provost for Curricular and Pedagogical Initiatives and more recently Chair of the Humanities Division at Morehouse. Dr. Myrick-Harris White is currently Co-Editor-In-Chief of The Black Scholar Journal. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of race, class, culture, and gender in the quest for social change and justice, emphasizing leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

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 Nathan H. Dize, who teaches in the Department of French at Washington University in Saint Louis, and his work is situated at the intersection of French Caribbean literary and intellectual history, African Diaspora studies, translation studies. He is currently working on two projects: Attending to the Dead: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning (SUNY Press) and Handle with Care: The Legacies of African American Translators of Francophone Literature (LSU Press). Nathan is also a translator of Haitian literature, and his translations include the novels Duels by Néhémy Dahomey, The Immortals and The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot. He is also a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective, a member of the digital networks of Fanm Rebèl and Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History, and a founding editor of the digital history project, A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. He is a co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press.

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 Robin Brooks, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and journal publications, she is the author of Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (2022) and at work on a book project tentatively titled Death Proximity: Grief and Emotional Wellness Stories in Black Communities.In this conversation, we discuss the diasporic Black literary tradition, the expansiveness of the field, and the fecundity of mixed-methods research for the study of Black life.

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 Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and others.

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, 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 Derek Handley, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Along with a number of articles on rhetoric, urban studies, and composition, he is the author of Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance during the Black Freedom Movement (2024).In this conversation, we discuss the the place of rhetorical work in the Black intellectual tradition, community work and politics, and the future of Black Studies as a multi-disciplinary project.