The Black Studies Podcast

This is John Drabinski 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 Khalil Saucier, who teaches in the Department of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Along with a number of scholarly articles and short pieces, he is the author of Necessarily Black: Cape Verdean Youth, Hip Hop Culture, and a Critique of Identity (2015), co-author of African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism (2024), and has done editorial work producing important volumes including most recently A Luta Continua: Reintroducing Amilcar Cabral to a New Generation of Thinkers (2016), Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation Theory (2016), and The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (2021). In this conversation, we discuss transnational study and the Black Studies imagination, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the transformation of disciplines when put in contact with Black Studies sensibilities.

This is John Drabinski 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 Chevy Eugene, who teaches in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In addition to a number of scholarly publications on Caribbean thought and the issue of reparations, he has co-edited a book Public Policy Formulation in Post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean from Palgrave (2025) and has done national and international advocacy and activist work on reparations for slavery in the Caribbean. Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between justice work and Black study, the relationship between Black Studies and community struggle, and the impact of Black ways of knowing on the Black Studies classroom.

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 Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who teaches in Black Studies at University of Rochester where he is the founding Chair of the department. He is the author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (2014) and co-editor of Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019). In this episode, we discuss Black Studies, gender, sexuality, and the politics of thinking and doing Black study in the current political moment.

This is John Drabinski 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 Layla Brown, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Along with scholarly and popular venue essays and critical articles, she was the co-host with Charisse Burden-Stelly of The Last Dope Intellectual podcast and is currently working with Burden-Stelly on a video podcasted series with Black Liberation Media. In this conversation, we discuss the differences between and intersections of transnational study and pan-Africanism, anthropological research in a Black Studies context, and the relationship between the production of ideas and the work of liberation struggle.

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 Nwando Achebe, who teaches in the Department of History at Michigan State University where she serves as Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History and also works as Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation in the College of Social Science. Her work is wide-ranging and across media, having been extensively featured in radio and television documentaries, popular print media, and scholarly journals. Achebe's written work includes the groundbreaking books Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 and The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, the co-authored History of West Africa E-Course Book, edited collections including A Companion to African History and Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective. In this episode, we discuss the place of the study of Africa in Black Studies, the importance of gender in the study of Africa and the Black Atlantic, and how oral testimony and knowledge production transforms the study of history.

This is John Drabinski 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 Sarah Jane Cervenak, who teaches in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (2014) and Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (2022). With J. Kameron Carter, she is co-editor of the series Black Outdoors on Duke University Press. Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between performance studies and Black Studies, the meaning of Black study in the classroom, and the place of expressive culture in the field.

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 Sonja Lanehart, who teaches in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona where her scholarship focuses on sociolinguistics and language variation, language and education in African American communities, language and identity, and African American education from Black Feminist, Intersectionality, and Critical Race Theory perspectives. In addition to a number of important articles on African American linguistic practices, she is the author and editor of a number of books including Sista, Speak!: Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy, Language in African American Communities, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. In this conversation, we discuss the horizons of linguistic research in a Black Studies frame, the place of gender and sexuality in understanding African American linguistic practices, and how to think about teaching in politically fraught times.

This is John Drabinski 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 Walter Greason, who teaches in the Department of History at Macalester College. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing publications, projects such as The Racial Violence Syllabus, The T. Thomas Fortune Center, and The Wakanda Syllabus, he is the author of a number of groundbreaking works, including The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey (2010), Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (2012), and most recently, in collaboration with Tim Fielder, The Graphic History of Hip Hop (2024). Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between historical research and Black Studies work, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the intersections of teaching, writing, and direct action aimed at racial justice.

This is John Drabinski 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 Saida Grundy, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology at Boston University. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing publications, she is the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (2022). Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between sociological research and Black Studies work, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the complex intersection of movement work and research.

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.Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies. In addition to many academic and public facing essays, he is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020). He is the producer for Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and the short video series The Bigger Picture (2022) for PBS Digital Studios.

This is John Drabinski 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 Reighan Gillam, who teaches in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth University. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she has published Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (2022) and is completing a book project titled Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism in Brazil. As well, she is the host of a podcast series on the New Books Network that was recently honored for its public facing scholarship work by the American Anthropological Association. In this conversation, we discuss the place of anthropological methods and sensibilities in the field of Black Studies, the cultural importance of transnational exchange, and the place of Brazil and related Latin American sites in the Black Studies imagination.

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 between me and John E. Drabinski, my department colleague in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Maryland. As co-hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, we wanted to close out the first calendar year of the project with a reflection on the series thus far, sharing our key takeaways and the insights we've gained through the first seventy discussions of the past and future of the field. In this conversation, we discuss what for us has been both expected and unexpected in the project, what new horizons podcast episodes have opened up for us, and what new critical questions are guiding our evolving portraits of the field.

This is John Drabinski 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 Ed Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia, where he also holds an affiliation with the faculty of Creative Writing. In addition to a series of scholarly and popular essays, he is the author of a number of books and poetry collections, including most recently Call it in the Air (2022), Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes (2021), and is currently composing an intellectual biography of James Baldwin rooted in newly discovered archival materials. In this conversation, we discuss the relation between music and literature in the Black Studies tradition, the place of community in the formal and everyday practice of Black study, and importance of conversation, critical work, and creative expression.

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 Ozay Moore, an Emcee, DJ, Muralist, and community organizer who is the Executive Director of All of the Above Hip Hop Academy in Lansing, Michigan. In this discussion, we explore the cultural and historical significance of hip hop, the relationship between expressive culture and the politics of place, and the profound contribution of hip hop culture to how we might understand pedagogy and social transformation.

This is John Drabinski 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 Reiland Rabaka, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is the founder and director of the Center for African and African American Studies. He is the author of a number of important books in the Black Atlantic intellectual tradition, including Du Bois’ Dialectics (2009), Africana Critical Theory (2010), Forms of Fanonism (2011), and most recently Black Women’s Liberation Music (2023) and The Funk Movement (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the place of musical performance in the formation of Black intellectual life, the expansive nature of Black Studies as a political and liberatory movement, and the importance of thinking in the present even as we reckon with the past and imagine a future.

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 episode features Gerald Horne, who teaches in the Department of History at University of Houston. He has written many scholarly and popular essays on history, race, and politics, and is the author over thirty books including most recently Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1900-2000 (2023) and The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism (2022), as well as the recently published I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the process of rewriting history from the perspective of African Americans, the impact of that writing on the field of Black Studies, and importance of transnational solidarities for Black liberation struggle.

This is John Drabinski 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 Zalika U. Ibaorimi, who works under the artist name N0HumanInv0lved (N.H.I.) and teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. Her work engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes in order to trace the Human sexual geographies in the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Additionally, they consider the discursiveness of critical Humanism as a way to chart the figuration of the Black wh0re vis-à-vis the counter- and anti-Human. In this conversation, we discuss the work of undisciplining the field of Black studies, how critical theory and art practice converge to open new horizons in the field, and the significance of breaking with normative notions of taste in thinking about Black life.

This is John Drabinski 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 Stephanie Sparling Williams, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial practice is predicated on interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching on American art, and foregrounds Black Feminist space-making. She is the author of Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O'Grady and the Art of Language from 2021 and Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, forthcoming in 2025. Her scholarly work is invested in the space of the museum, with a focus on African American art and culture, and the work of U.S.-based artists of color, as well as material histories, cross cultural exchange, strategies of address, and contemporary art that engages with the history of the United States. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative work of Black study and Black Studies, the museum as community and political space, and the place of beauty and joy in thinking about Black life.(Photo credit: Hector René Membreño-Canales)

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 Aisha Durham, Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life in the "post" era using auto/ethnography, performance writing, and Black feminist intersectional approaches refined in hip hop feminism. She engages these methods in her two edited books and NCA award-winning monograph Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. She has edited journal special issues about local Florida and transnational culture and her research has been featured in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, the Journal of Autoethnography, and Communication, Culture, and Critique. Durham is a former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Fellow (Brazil), The National Museum of African American History and Culture advisory board member for their hip hop anthology, and an Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography and Personal Narrative Research award recipient. She has also written public scholarship for news and entertainment outlets, such as Tampa Bay Times, NPR, and Haaretz.

This is John Drabinski 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 Robin Means Coleman, Professor of Media Studies and of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia where she is also Director of the Black Fantastic Media Research Lab. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular essays, she is the author of Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, published as a second edition in 2023, and,] African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor, published in 2000. She is co-author of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar (2023) and Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014). She is the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002) and co-editor of both The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2024) and Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (2008). In this conversation, we discuss the dynamic character of Black Studies in relation to community-campus relations, the political nature of research and teaching, and the complex relationship between Black Studies and study focused on Black topics

This is John Drabinski 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 Jervette R. Ward, who teaches in and chairs the newly re-established Department of Black Studies at The City College of New York. In addition to her writing and editing work on African American literature and popular culture, she serves as president of the College Language Association. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between Black studies and literature, how the past struggles to establish the field inform ongoing Black liberation struggle, and how the past and future of Black Studies engages with community life and its everyday habits, objects, and complex practices.

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 episode features Rita Kiki Edozie, the Deval Patrick Endowed Chair of Political, Economic, and Social Innovation and Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is the university’s former interim Dean of the John W McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies. Her recent books, The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance (2014) and Pan-Africa Rising: The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business (2017), and Africa’s New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations (with Moses Khisa, 2022).

This is John Drabinski 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 Juanita Stephen, who teaches in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Critical Studies at University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. Her research is guided by feminist theory and its methodologies, draws on the insights of care practice and community work, and is focused on questions of gender, families, and children in a Black Studies frame. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between Black study and care, how childhood and care networks inform theory and writing, and how the past and future of Black Studies engages with community life and its everyday practices.

This is John Drabinski 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 Philip McHarris, who teaches in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at University of Rochester. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing essays, he is the author of Beyond Policing (2024) and is completing a book manuscript titled Brick Dreams, to be published by Princeton University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the urgency of the study of policing and mass incarceration for Black Studies, the politics of thinking expansively about Black study, and the transformative work that comes from teaching and imagining from a space of Black liberation struggle.

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 Dawn-Elissa Fischer, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. She centers her scholarly endeavors around the thematic core of "Representing the Unseen." For over two decades, ethnographic research has been her pathway to navigating the frontlines of social movements and Black entertainment, unearthing narratives obscured from view, exposing both the unnoticed struggles and triumphs. Her work intricately illuminates the dynamic digital worlds of today’s youth, weaving stories from underground emcees, grassroots organizers, cosplay vloggers, gaming influencers, and other digital creators into a cohesive narrative of an ongoing online revolution. Beyond exploration, the thematic framework of "Representing the Unseen" serves as a lens to acknowledge and elevate historically excluded educators' intellectual and social justice contributions in critical pedagogy and public engagement. With meticulous evaluation spanning K-12 and postsecondary education since 1999, Fischer's commitment remains steadfast to shedding light on hidden narratives and fostering inclusivity within academia and broader societal contexts.

This is John Drabinski 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 Neil Roberts, Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. Along with numerous articles in academic journals, he is the author of Freedom as Marronage (2015) and editor or co-editor of Creolizing Rousseau (2014), Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), and A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018). In this conversation, we discuss the place in Caribbean history and thought in Black Studies, the complexity of thinking freedom in the Black Atlantic world, and the challenges that have come with the institutionalization of the field.

This is John Drabinski 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 Donelle Boose, who teaches in the Department of History and African American Studies Program at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. She is an historian who works between public history, archival research, and Black Studies sensibilities. In this conversation, we discuss the relation between public facing work and Black study, documentation and evidence in popular and academic historical writing, and the transformative nature of the Black Studies classroom.

This is John Drabinski 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 Ashanté Reese, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular articles, she is the author of Black Food Geographies:Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (2019) and the co-editor with Hanna Garth of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the place of ethnographic research in Black Studies, the relationship between teaching, scholarship, and racialized space in disciplinary and non-disciplinary places, and the politics of community work as a form of Black study and practice.

This is John Drabinski 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 Kameelah Martin, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the College of Charleston. She has written extensively on African American literature and diasporic cultural studies and is the author of Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo (2012), Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (2016), and co-editor of The Lemonade Reader (2019). In this conversation, we discuss the place of literary studies in the field of Black Studies, the relationship between folk cultural production and everyday Black life, and the reach of Black study inside and outside the academy.

This is John Drabinski 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 Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. She has written extensively on African American literature and cultural studies and is the author of Afro-Realism and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel, published in 2020 and designated as honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. In this conversation, we discuss the place of literary studies in the Black Studies imagination, the relationship between cultural production and everyday Black life, and the politics of Black study inside and outside the academy.

This is John Drabinski 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 Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., who is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing essays, he is the author of a number of books including most recently An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion (2018), Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020), and We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For (2024). He also maintains a Substack newsletter under the title A Native Son. In this conversation, we discuss the place of religious studies in the field of Black Studies, the impact of pragmatism, prophetic work, and political thinking on reckoning with Black life, and the complex methods, critical frames, and sensibilities that comprise the field.

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 Jasmine Lee, who works as Associate Vice President for Community and Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Having earned her PhD in Education at Michigan State University in 2016, she works to create "inclusive campus environments through direct programming, strategic student success initiatives, and collaborative leadership, along with consultation for racial climate concerns and broader diversity issues for faculty and staff across campus." In this discussion, we explore the meaning of Black Studies and the study of Black life in classrooms, in non-profit communities, and in educational settings between community and campus.

This is John Drabinski 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 Biko Caruthers, assistant professor and Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at New York University. His work engages with visual art, literature and history, and the theoretical and readerly possibilities of afropessimism. In this conversation, we explore the origins and political significance of Black Studies, the complex relationship between insurgent work in the field and the institutionalization of departments and professorial life, and how pessimist theory opens new horizons for reading historical texts and intervening in moments of cultural and political violence.

This is John Drabinski 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 Willie Mack, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Missouri. He has written widely in the history of transnational contact and political meaning between Haiti and the United States, carcerality and racial power, and is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Transnational Carceral Regimes and Punitive Anti-communism: Haitian Immigrants, Race, Empire, and Policing in New York City and Haiti, 1915-2000. In this conversation, we explore the place of Haiti in the Black Studies imagination, carceral studies and the politics of blackness, and the shift of the meaning of historical research inside a Black Studies sensibility.

This is John Drabinski 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 Sonya Donaldson, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Colby College. She works at the intersections of race, class, gender, and technologies and seeks to elucidate the relationship between race, diaspora, and nation. Her research interests include African American Literature, Black Digital Humanities, and Black German Studies. She is the creator of the digital humanities project, Singing the Nation [Into Being], a collection of performances of James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Donaldson is also the executive director of media and archives for the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) and a fellow at the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College. In this conversation, we discuss the place of community work inside and outside the Black Studies academy, literary studies and questions of digitality, and the expansive possibilities of the Black Studies classroom.

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 Chad L. Williams, Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (2010), which won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and a 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (2023), and he is also coeditor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (2016).

This is John Drabinski 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 Courtney Terry, assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches and writes on the history of and resonance between literary and popular cultural figures around questions of race, class, and expressive life. She also serves as Director of Education for The Hip Hop Museum in Bronx, New York. In this conversation, we discuss the place of popular cultural studies in the field, the echos of forms of blackness across African American history, and how an interrogation of cultural production expands the living archive of Black Studies..

This is John Drabinski 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 Elena Guzman, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. In addition to her critical writing and research in anthropology, which includes a book manuscript entitled Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean she is a filmmaker whose creative work explores “the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health.” In this conversation, we discuss the expansive possibilities of transdisciplinary thinking, the role of a Black Studies sensibility in anthropological research, and the place of creative work in the institutional life of Black Studies.

This is John Drabinski 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 Christin Washington, a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland. Her interests lie at the intersection of Caribbean studies, the cultural labor of Black women’s religious practices, digital studies, and immersive forms of scholarship and and expressive work. In this conversation, we discuss the place of love and imagination in Black Studies, design as intellectual work, and digital studies as play, immersion, and meaning-making.

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 Walidah Imarisha, Director of the Center for Black Studies and Associate Professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. She is the co-editor of two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. She is also the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She spent 6 years with the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project as a public scholar facilitating programs across the state about Oregon Black history and other topics. In 2015, she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing. In this conversation, we discuss the political meaning of Black Studies, the place of speculative thinking and fiction in the field, and the forms of time appropriate to the study of Black life, history, and expressive culture.

This is John Drabinski 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 Qiana Whitted, who teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature and in the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. In addition to numerous articles on African American literature and graphic culture, she is the author of three books - ‘A God of Justice?’: The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature (2009), EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (2019), Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023) - and is the editor, with Brannon Costello, of Comics and the U.S. South (2012). In this conversation, we discuss the place of material culture in Black Studies, the meaning of graphic and comic book representation of Black life, and how an expanding sense of a Black Studies archive impacts the field.

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 LaToya Brackett, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She researches and publishes on questions of intercultural communication, diasporic identity and meaning, and popular cultural studies. In addition to her appointment as assistant professor, she is a member of the Race and Pedagogy Institute at UPS. This conversation explores how Black Studies shifts the meaning of academic social space, intellectual space, and transforms our sense of classroom pedagogy.

This is John Drabinski 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 Christina Knight, who teaches in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. Christina received her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University. Her work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently at work on a manuscript, The Ship That is the Body: The Middle Passage in Time-Based Art, which investigates contemporary black American performing and visual arts that reimagine the history of the Atlantic slave trade. In this conversation, we discuss the place of expressive culture in Black Studies, how embodiment challenges conventions in scholarship, the profession, and in the classroom, and how time and physics recalibrate our understanding of blackness.Our discussion refers to her short film doomsday : fieldnotes, which can viewed on YouTube.

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 Professor Minkah Makalani, who teaches in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University where he is also the director of the Center for Africana Studies. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 and the co-editor with Davarian L. Baldwin of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. In this conversation, we discuss his journey into and interest in the field of Black Studies, the importance of political and historical dimensions to Black study, and the place of internationalist discourse in the field.

This is John Drabinski 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 Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles and edited collections, he is the author of What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2001), Songs in the Key of Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013), Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (2022), and the groundbreaking work The New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity, published in 2005 and reissued as a second edition in 2015. He is also the host of the long-running series Left of Black, a series of discussions of popular culture and scholarly treatments of Black life. In this conversation, we discuss his entry into Black Studies, the place of popular cultural study in the field’s past and future, and the complex relationship between scholarly work and the everyday lives of Black people.

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 Professor Nathaniel Norment, Professor of English at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia where he also directs the Black Ink Project. He is well-known for his innovations in the field of Black Studies as a writer and cultural historian, and in addition to a number of scholarly articles he is the author-editor of a number of key books including Readings in African American Language, The African American Studies Reader, The Addison Gayle, Jr. Reader, and African American Studies: The Discipline and its Dimensions. In this conversation, he reflects on his journey into the study of Black life, the history of the field, and the place of critical expressive writing in the development of Black Studies thought, reflection, and its intellectual contributions.

This is John Drabinski 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 Wendyliz Martinez, a 2024 ACLS Leading Edge fellow where she works with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice developing a digital humanities project related to the history of slavery within the state of New Jersey. She earned her doctorate in English and African American Studies at Penn State University and is a City College of New York and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow alumna. She is currently writing about Black girlhood and its depictions in social media, film, and literature, and maintains interest in art practices from Black communities and its impact on our understanding of Blackness as well as its role in preserving histories.

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.

This is John Drabinski 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 J. Kameron Carter, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine. He has written numerous scholarly articles in race and religion and is the author of two books: Race: A Theological Account from 2008 and The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song from 2023. With Sarah Jane Cervenak, he is the co-editor of the series “Black Outdoors” on Duke University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of religion and religious studies in the Black Studies tradition, how Black study treats community and ordinary life as sites of knowing and being, and how a commitment to the everyday opens up new horizons for the field of Black Studies.

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.