Tikia Hamilton - Department of History, Loyola University of Chicago

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 Tikia Hamilton, who teaches in the Department of History at Loyola University of Chicago. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of Nothing Less Than Equality: The Battle Over Segregated Education in the Nation's Capital, published in March 2026. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of writing the history of Black life, the centrality of questions of education in Black study, and how Black Studies informs her research questions, sources, and approach to writing.