David Green - Department of English, Howard University

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 Green, who teaches in the Department of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where he also directs the first year writing program. In addition to a number of articles on critical writing and race, he is the editor of Visions and Cyphers, a writing studies textbook that emphasizes culture and language research in composition studies. In this conversation, we discuss the place of language and writing in the Black Studies tradition, the function of expressive life in the field, and the future horizons of critical inquiry into Black life.