Bettina Judd - Department of African American Studies, Emory University

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 Bettina Judd, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. She is a poet and critic whose research explores Black feminist methods and sensibilities. Along with a number of scholarly articles and published poems, including the collection Patient (2014), she is the author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (2023). In this conversation, we explore the origins of Black ways of knowing and knowledge production, the importance of cultural study for Black Studies, and the place of creative work in the field.