Justene H. Edwards - Department of History, University of Virginia

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.