Justin Leroy - Department of History, Duke 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 Justin Leroy, who teaches in the Department of History at Duke University. He specializes in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular interests in intellectual history, slavery, abolition, and the history of capitalism. His first book, The Lowest Freedom, recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that located the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. His current research focuses on carceral studies, and he is working on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. He also has longstanding interests in comparative Black/Indigenous and Black/Asian American histories.