Nicosia Shakes - Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced

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 Nicosia Shakes, who teaches in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Merced. In addition to essays in edited collections and journals such as Cultural Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Black Scholar, the CLR James Journal, SX Salon, she is the author of Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space (2023), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as an activist discipline, the importance of transnational, comparative work, and the demands of multidisciplinary research and study.