Erika Denise Edwards - Department of History, University of Texas at El Paso

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 Erika Denise Edwards, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of the award-winning book Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law and the Making of a White Argentine Republic from 2020. She is currently editing special issue of Global Black Thought on the theme of “Race in Colonial Latin America,” co-editing the anthology Rhetorical Ambiguities: Blood Purity, Calidad, and Colonial Identities in the Iberian World, 1500-1750, and is the Series Editor for Routledge’s “Women in the Americas” book series.  In this conversation, we discuss the relation between geography and the Black Studies tradition, the place of gender in thinking through the field, and how the movement of Black Studies into Latin American spaces opens up new horizons of reflection.