Brandon Byrd - Department of African American Studies, Vanderbilt University

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 Brandon Byrd, who teaches in the Departments of History and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a historian of Black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on the United States and Haiti. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti and the co-editor of two books, Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History and Haiti for the Haitians.