Jonathan Howard - Departments of English and Black Studies, Yale 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 Jonathan Howard, who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support fromthe Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be found at Callaloo, Souls, Atlantic Studies, and Transition Magazine. His first, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the water as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that the blackness which dawned in the oceanic encounter of Middle Passage is best apprehended not as social death but ecological life.