Robert J. Patterson - Department of Black Studies, Georgetown University

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 Robert J. Patterson, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at Georgetown University. Along with numerous scholarly essays in journals and edited collections, he is the author of Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality (2019) and Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture (2013), co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (2016), and editor of the award-winning Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights (2019). In this conversation, we discuss curriculum writing and Black Studies, historical research and Black study, and the place of cultural studies in the field.