Jessica Millward - Departments of History and African American Studies, University of California, Irvine

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 Jessica Millward, who teaches in the Departments of History and African American Studies at University of California, Irvine. Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, she is the author of Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (2015). In this conversation, we discuss race and gender, archival work, and the complex task of writing African American women’s history in a Black Studies context.