Matthew Simmons - Program in African American Studies, University of Alabama, Birmingham

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 Matthew Simmons, who teaches in the Program in African American Studies at University of Alabama, Birmingham. His work focuses on Black voting behavior, with particular attention to non-voting individuals and communities and what non-voting says about the politics of Black life. In this conversation, we discuss the relation of culture and politics in the Black Studies tradition, activism and pedagogy, and new horizons opened in the field around questions of gender and sexuality.