Mary Phillips - Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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 discussion is with Mary Frances Phillips, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on modern Black freedom struggle, Black Women’s Studies, and the legacies and traditions of Black feminism. In addition to scholarly and popular pieces, she has published Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (NYU Press, 2025. In this conversation, we discuss radical Black political struggle, the importance of questions of gender in thinking about freedom work, and innovations in the field of Black Studies.