Tyler D. Parry - Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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 Tyler D. Parry, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Disapora Studies at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of a number of scholarly and public-facing essays, and has published Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (2020) and, with Robert Greene II, Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (2021). In this conversation, we explore the importance of regional attentiveness in writing Black history in the United States, thinking blackness in the southwest, and the expansiveness of the Black Studies archive and imagination.