The Black Studies Podcast

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 writer and poet Khalisa Rae Thompson, who is co-founder and co-director of Griot and Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference. Her writing has been featured in a number of literary and popular venues and she is the author of Real Girls Have Real Problems and of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat. In this conversation, we discuss the intersection of writing and memory work, poetry and community connection, and the politics of publishing on Black life.

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.

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 Shylah Hamilton-Touré, who teaches in the Program in Critical Ethnic Studies at the California College of the Arts and is also Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Jambalaya Center for Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts. She is a writer and practicing artist whose work explores themes of gender, diaspora, and indigeneity through critical and visual practice. In this conversation, we explore the importance of surrealism for articulating the meaning of Black life, decolonial and indigenous resources for thinking blackness and liberation, and the place of art and expressive culture in Black Studies.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with W. Lawrence Hogue, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Houston. He received his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, with an emphasis on 20th Century American literature, U S Minority literatures, and Critical Theory. He was one of the first critics to raise questions about literary production, representation, and canon formation in African American literature,opening up an entirely new area of intellectual inquiry. He is the author of Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text, which has been republished as an e-book (Duke 1986), Race, Modernity; Post-modernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s (SUNY 1996); The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (SUNY 2003); Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (Illinois 2009); Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives (SUNY 2013); and A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation (2020). He wrote the introduction to Clarence Major’s My Amputations (reissued 2008), and is researching and writing a literary biography of the novelist Charles Wright. He is the recipient of a Ford Foundation-National Research Council Fellowship, as well as several grants and fellowships at the University of Houston. He has book reviews, book chapters, and articles published in the major journals and critical anthologies in the academy.Active in American Literature, African American Literature, Minority Literatures, Postmodern Literature, and Critical Theory, he has lectured and presented papers at universities and conferences throughout the United States and Canada. His interest in postmodern fiction and diasporic African literatures has taken him to Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, and Argentina.

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 Laurian Bowles, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Davidson College. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (2025), which follows women head porters in Ghana to examine how women navigate precarity with creativity and care, offering a fresh analytic on racial capitalism, sexual autonomy and urban futurity in Africa. In this conversation, we explore the impact of Black Studies on ethnographic practices, Black study in a digital age, and the critical tension between Black Studies practices and institutions of higher education.

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 Amanda Boston, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Black Studies approaches to urban studies, questions of neoliberalism and economics, and the impact of structural racism on housing in historically Black communities.She is completing her first book on gentrification’s racial operations and the making and unmaking of Black communities in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and she has published related works in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes in sociology and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches to the study of Black urban life, the relationship between social scientific methodologies and the traditions of Black Studies, and the impact of Black Studies research on Black communities and struggles for racial justice.

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 Skye Jackson, a New Orleans-based writer and poet who teaches at Xavier University in New Orleans. She is a poet and critic whose work explores the complex and various forms of Black life, from the social life of violence to the intimate life of embodiment and familial and romantic relationships. Along with a number of poems in journals and edited collections, she is the co-author with Santos Calavera of a faster grave (2019) and author of the collection Libre (2025). In this conversation, we explore the place of poetry in articulating the meaning of Black life, the past and future possibilities of the poetic word, and how reading, study, and contemplation settle inside creative work.

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 Michele Prettyman, who teaches in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her work engages across creative and analytical practices in order to examine the complexity of storytelling and African American life. Along with scholarly articles and work on cinema, she is an editorial board member at liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies and is co-founder of Daughters of Eve Media. She was also featured in the documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking. In this conversation, we discuss the place of media studies in the examination of Black life, how Black Studies sensibilities shape theory and practice, and the relationship between creative work and community.

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 Andrea J. Queeley, who teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles in key journals and collections, she is the author of Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba (2015) and co-editor with Devyn Benson and Yesenia Fernández Selier of Gloria Rolando: Memory, Liberation, and the African Diaspora Through Cuban Film (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of Caribbean history and thinking for Black Studies, the place of cinematic work in knowledge production, and how anthropological methods expand the work of Black study.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Ronald Angelo Johnson, Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. His latest book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, published in 2025 by Cornell University Press, is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution, which brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. Entangled Alliances has received the Texas Institute of Letters Honor Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Johnson is currently working on the book We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press), a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. His first book was Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance, and he is the co-editor (with Ousmane Power-Greene) of the book In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.Johnson serves as Steward of the Ella Wall Prichard Fund for Early Black Baptist History (EBBH) at Baylor University, which supports the study, research, and documentation of Black Baptist life and thought in North America up to 1866.

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 Bettina Judd, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. She is a poet and critic whose research explores Black feminist methods and sensibilities. Along with a number of scholarly articles and published poems, including the collection Patient (2014), she is the author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (2023). In this conversation, we explore the origins of Black ways of knowing and knowledge production, the importance of cultural study for Black Studies, and the place of creative work in the field.

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 Christel Temple, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Africana cultural memory studies, Pan-Africanism, the intersection of History and Literature, comparative Black literature, and Afroeuropean Studies. Along with numerous scholarly articles, including —"A Value Added Module for Introduction to Black Studies:  Speaking in the Disciplines and Africana Market Value," in Afrocentric Innovations in Higher Education, she is the author of Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism (2005), Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise (2017), Black Cultural Mythology (2020), and co-editor with James L. Conyers, Jr. of Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory (2022). In this conversation, we discuss the distinctiveness of Black Studies methods and disciplinary work, the transformative work of Black study in the classroom, and how Black Studies works both inside and outside traditional disciplines and areas of study.

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 Kevin Rigby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research is concerned with the complex effects and affects of afropessimist theory for thinking through issues of history, culture, and politics, specifically focused on the structure and meaning of Black protest. In this conversation, we explore the place of pessimist theory in Black study, political mobilization and community work, and how Black Studies shapes research and the classroom.

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 Ifetayo Flannery, who teaches in the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University. Her research focuses on Black Studies methodology, questions of identity across the African diaspora, and the expansive significance of religious traditions. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Lineage: Religious Culture & the (Re)Makings of Ethnic Identity in the African Diaspora and editor of the collection An Introduction to Black Psychology. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of Black Studies as a discipline, the contributions and challenges of Africological approaches to the field, and how Black Studies methodologies shape and reshape ethical, political, and cultural life.

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 Tanisha M. Jackson, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University where she is also Executive Director of the Community Folk Art Center. Her research focuses on the place of community art practice and education in liberation struggle. Along with a number of scholarly essays and curated exhibitions, she is the author Black Women's Art Ecosystems: Sites of Wellness and Self-care (2025), which was awarded the Anna Julia Cooper and CLR James award for outstanding publication in Africana Studies (National Council for Black Studies). She recently received an National Endowment for the Arts grant for the Community Folk Art Center's inaugural artists in residency program and she is the founder and host of the film series, Black Arts Speak. In this conversation, we discuss the place of art in the field of Black Studies, how art and community expand our sense of liberation work, and how the Black Studies classroom links the personal, the communal, and the aesthetic.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Robert P. Robinson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Gender Studies at John Jay College and Doctoral Faculty in Urban Education, Africana Studies, and Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Prior to higher education, he was a K-12 educator and mentor for 11 years. His broad research and teaching focus on the Black Freedom Movement, Black education history, Blackqueer studies, digital humanities, history of education, and curriculum studies. Robinson’s work can be found in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal for Multicultural Education, and The Killens Review of Arts & Letters, and more. Robinson is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow for his forthcoming book, Education for the Revolution: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, which will be published in January 2027 through NYU Press’s Black Power Series.

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 Melanie Holmes, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the meaning and significance of Black Power across geographies, in particular in the political and cultural space of the United States and Barbados. Her work on these issues can be found in a cluster of publications, including “Beautifully Black!: How Negro History Week and the Black History Movement Influenced Education in and Beyond the Black Power Era,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of African American History. In this conversation, we explore the complex history of resistance to antiblack racism, the relationship between Black study and education, and how historical research both grounds and expands the Black Studies imagination.

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 Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, who teaches in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She has published extensively in popular and scholarly venues and is the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020) and of the forthcoming The Survival of a People. In this conversation, we discuss the complex geographies of blackness in the Atlantic world, archival work and its relation to Black study, and the expansive historical, literary, and theoretical horizons of Black Studies.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Desiree Cooper, a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, former attorney, and editor of the groundbreaking 2026 anthology, Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors. Her work, which often explores the intersection between gender and race, has appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash Fiction America 2023, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and noted in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection, Know the Mother. Her children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and one of the New York Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.”  

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 Michelle B. Taylor, an educator, author, and advocate who writes under the name Feminista Jones. She has published widely in popular and scholarly venues, has spoken in academic and community spaces across the country, and earned a doctorate in Africology and African American Studies from Temple University where she teaches courses on gender, race, and media. Her books include Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets (2019), The Secret of Sugar Water (2017), and Push The Button (2014). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of Africological approaches to Black study, the relationship between scholarly inquiry and community activism, and the place of popular and scholarly writing in Black Studies.

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 Joanna Cardenas, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the nexus of critical carceral studies, disability studies, and Black feminist thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, gender, and space. Through a close spatial analysis of California prisons, her research focuses on how systems of confinement inform  understandings of gender, race, and ableism. She also studies how the carceral state of South Central Los Angeles impacts Black and Latinx women, with a focus on surveillance and other policing practices. With a deep engagement in community-based research, she also helps interrogate the experimentation of new surveillance and policing technologies in Skid Row, the Figueroa corridor, and Los Angeles more broadly. Joanna’s research has been supported by the Greater Good Science Center, the Black Studies Collaboratory, the Center for Race and Gender, Berkeley Law, and Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program. Beyond academia, Joanna is also actively involved in litigation challenging staff misconduct across California state prisons. In this conversation, we discuss the place of carceral studies in the study of Black life, how urban studies and questions of gender impact Black Studies inquiry, and how community work expands the classroom and intellectual life.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Justin Leroy, who teaches in the Department of History at Duke University. He specializes in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular interests in intellectual history, slavery, abolition, and the history of capitalism. His first book, The Lowest Freedom, recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that located the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. His current research focuses on carceral studies, and he is working on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. He also has longstanding interests in comparative Black/Indigenous and Black/Asian American histories.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Kaiama L. Glover, professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life" (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton) and a series of essays, “‘Blackness’ in French.” Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction. She is also the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. Professor Glover's scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Kinitra Brooks, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture as seen in her weekly column for The Root, “The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country” and her multiple visits as a commentator on NPR’s 1A.  She has co-edited The Lemonade Reader (Routledge 2019), an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade. She has recently co-edited The Renaissance Reader (Routledge 2025), which is also based on a Beyoncé project. Her two other books are Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman throughout history and in contemporary popular culture as seen in her forthcoming graphic novel, Red Dirt Witch (Abrams Books 2026). Dr. Brooks recently served as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University during the 2018-2019 academic year. Dr. Brooks also served as the Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School for the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Brooks’ current book project, Divine Conjurers: Rootwork, Resistance, and Revolution explores the unique relationship between Black women’s political subversion and Black women’s spirit work.

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 andré carrington, who teaches in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. He has published extensively on literature and the speculative arts and is the author of two books, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016) and Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (2026), as well as editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of the Black Studies imagination, the place of popular and graphic arts in Black study, and the terms of thinking and teaching Black life in times of political crisis.

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 Kyra Gaunt, who teaches in the Department of Music and Theater at State University of New York, Albany. She has published extensively on race and gender in both academic and popular venues, and is the author of the groundbreaking work The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop (2007). In this conversation, we explore the significance of musical study in the field of Black Studies, the relationship between vernacular cultural practices and world- and idea-making, and how a focus on the experiences of Black girls and women shifts our understanding of the meaning of Black study.

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 LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, who teaches in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she also serves as Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. Her work is invested in history, spirituality, and memory, with a particular focus on African American women and religion. To that end, she is the author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (2014) and has edited two books, Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, with Carol B. Duncan and Tamura A. Lomax (2014) and Fat Religion: Protestant Christianity and the Construction of the Fat Body, with Lynne Gerber and Susan Hill (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of historical and religious study in Black Studies, spiritual practice as Black study, and how questions of gender and region transform our approach to the field.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Crystal N. Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History and affiliated faculty in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where she also serves as the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College. A native of North Carolina, she is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, U.S. women’s history, and the American South. Her scholarship examines racial and sexual violence, bridging social and political history to illuminate long-obscured dimensions of the American past. Attentive to absences and asymmetries in the archive, she draws on gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to interpret some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.Professor Feimster earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press), recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and honorable mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize. Her award-winning scholarship also includes the article “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” which received the Kentucky Historical Society’s Collins Award for best article in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” which received honorable mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She has published widely in leading journals and has written essays for broader audiences in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. She is currently completing two books, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.Her professional appointments reflect her leadership in the field. She is President of the Southern Association of Women’s Historians, a member of the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, Associate Editor of Civil War History, and Contributing Editor to Labor. She previously served as Co-President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and has held numerous leadership roles in national scholarly organizations. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and other distinguished institutions. A devoted and award-winning teacher, Professor Feimster offers well-subscribed courses on the Long Civil Rights Movement, African American Women’s History, Critical Race Theory, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In recognition of her commitment to undergraduate and graduate mentorship, she has received multiple honors, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Yale Provost Teaching Prize, the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize, the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring, and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities.

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 Maya Doig-Acuña, doctoral candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her work is invested in history and memory studies, with a particular focus on Afro-Latinx culture and identity that emphasizes diasporic movement and structures of kinship. To that end, she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation under the title We are Her Beloved Descendants: Alternate Archives of Afro-Panamanian Memory, Diaspora, and Kinship. In this conversation, we discuss the expansive reach of Black Studies, how Black study informs multidisciplinary approaches to the past, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape critical discourse around memory studies and historical research.

This is Brie Gorrell 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, 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 Dr. Willie Jamaal Wright who is a Research Fellow within the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include the study of urban and black geographies throughout the Black Diaspora. His writing has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the Black Scholar, City & Society and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Urban Studies Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. He is currently co-editing the late geographer, Bobby M. Wilson’s Consumer Political Economy and African America for the University of Georgia Press. Lastly, Dr. Wright is working on his first sole-authored text, Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in the Houston's Third Ward. In this conversation, we discuss black geographies as emerging field in black studies, black studies as life studies, as well as a place of refuge for black students.

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 Mark Sanders, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and English at University of Notre Dame. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles on African American and Afro-Caribbean literature and culture, as well as author, editor, and translator of three books, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown (1999), Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell from 2007) and A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence (2010). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational study, language diversity in the Black Americas, and the fecundity of Black Studies critical frames for the study of literature and culture.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Jocelyn Brown, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Ohio University with training in gerontology, applied sociology, and applied psychology. Originally from West Virginia, her scholarship centers Black Appalachian life across the life course. She has a particular focus on health disparities, structural racism, and the political-economic conditions shaping Black communities in Appalachia, the wider U.S., and the African diaspora.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Drew D. Brown, Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Florida, specializing in the intersections of Black Culture and Sports. His current book manuscript explores “Baller Culture,” the hip-hop-informed Black cultural expression found in sports. Analyzing sports media from 1988 to 2008, he argues that film, magazines, and commercials became a public arena where young Black Americans negotiated their cultural expression to shape and reshape identities, build community, and gain popularity. The book shows how they deployed a hybrid identity, which was often commodified and misrepresented by the media. Ultimately, the book highlights the constantly evolving nature of Black cultural identity.

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 Nneka Dennie, who teaches in the Department of History at Washington and Lee University. She has published on early African-American thought and history, with particular attention to the work of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and is the author and editor of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (2023) and the in-progress book Redefining Radicalism: Black Women Intellectuals in the Nineteenth Century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of historical and cultural research in the field of Black Studies, the place of gender in work on the African American intellectual tradition, and the urgency of the study of Black radical thought in our contemporary moment.

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 Andrea Mays, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of New Mexico. She has written extensively in public facing venues and has authored scholarly essays that draw on the history of Black art and what it has to say about resistance, refusal, and culture making in an antiblack world. Her work focuses on African American Visual Culture and Black Atlantic Culture and Politics, Afrofuturism, and Black Feminist Studies. Her research interests include Black Atlantic expressions of critical and resistance politics. Mays’ forthcoming essay “Legacies of Wisdom: The Praxis of Teaching Butler’s Visions of Apocalypse During Apocalyptic Times” will be included in a collection titled, Authority in the Speculative Fiction Classroom due out in 2026. Mays’ public scholarship includes essays and articles published in USA Today, The Albuquerque Journal, The Santa Fe Reporter, IKON Feminisms Digital Archive, and the Morgan State University Global Journalism Review. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of art and culture, new horizons of documenting everyday Black life, and the task of cultivating and sustaining the legacy of Black Studies in a politically fraught world.

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.

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 Sam Tecle, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research engages with Black and diaspora studies, Urban studies, and sociology of education with particular focus on the analysis of diverse experiences, trajectories and expressions of Blackness grounded in particular histories of racialization, colonialism, community formation and resistance. In this conversation, we discuss the early formative history of Black Studies in Canada, the roots of Black study epistemologies in everyday practice, and the complexity of diverse stories of blackness for the Black Studies imagination.

Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2026) and At the Margins of Nihilism (2026). He is also the co-editor with Michael Sawyer of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and co-host of both The Black Studies Podcast and Conversations in Atlantic Theory.In today’s conversation, we explore John Drabinski’s three latest monographs. In Atlantic Theory, he traces the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism while offering a comparative account of critical thought across the Atlantic world. In So Unimaginable a Price, he turns to James Baldwin, situating his work within a broader mid-century Atlantic context and placing it in dialogue with thinkers across the Caribbean and Africa.Finally, in At the Margins of Nihilism, he develops a theoretical framework through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson, drawing on figures such as Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Baldwin to examine how different forms of nihilism operate as closed systems, and how they are unsettled through vernacular practices of life and refusal.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Bryce Henson, a critical interpretive social scientist who specializes in Black diasporic cultural studies. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism with affiliations in Africana Studies and the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University. In 2016, he received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research with a Latin American & Caribbean Studies graduate minor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil examines how the Black hip-hop community in Salvador da Bahia constructs the quilombo (maroon) in urban contexts as a mode of fostering and protecting Black life. The book earned three awards from the National Communication Association and honorable mention for Best Book Prize from the Brazilian Studies Association. He is also a co-editor of the 2020 volume, Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization. Previously, he was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He now serves on the advisory board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).

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 RA Judy, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a number of important articles on aesthetics, language, and knowledge production in the broad Black intellectual tradition as well as two books, (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992) and Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (2020). In this conversation, we explore the place of diverse languages in Black Studies research, Black study as geographically adventurous, and the importance of thinking and practicing community work inside critical theoretical study.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Justene Hill Edwards, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (Norton, 2024) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021).  A specialist in African American history, her research examines Black economic life in America.  She has been awarded several fellowships and awards, most recently the 2025 Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction and the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.  She is a series editor for the History of U.S. Capitalism Series at Columbia University Press.  

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.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Kathryn Sophia Belle, philosopher, published author, and public speaker.  After earning her doctorate in philosophy, she had a successful 20-year career in academia (2003-2023) before resigning/retiring as a tenured associate professor (of philosophy, Black Studies, and Women's Studies) and administrator (directing an Africana Research Center).  Her scholarly specializations include African American/Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, Continental Philosophy/Existentialism, and Social/Political Philosophy. She is author of Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014, also in French: Éditions Kimé, 2023). She is also co-editor of Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010).  Her current writing projects include a book on the philosophy of Audre Lorde (under contract with Yale University Press) and her own memoir trilogy (Marriage/Motherhood/Erotic Empowerment).  Dr. Belle is founder of La Belle Vie Academy with signature programs: La Belle Vie Writers and Exit Strategies, Happily Unmarried and Erotic Empowerment.  Dr. Belle is now channeling her 20-years of experience and expertise in academia and La Belle Vie Academy with a new venture: Belle's Bed & Breakfast/Boutique Hotel - a continuation and extension of her overall vision.  She is delighted to call Savannah, GA her chosen and spiritual home – ever grateful to be in beloved community.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Vanessa K. Valdés, a writer and scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, performances, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She served as a professor at The City College for New York for 14 years, from 2007-2021, earning the rank of full professor, before being named the Dean of the Macaulay Honors College (2021-2022), then returning to City College as the Associate Provost for Community Engagement. Beginning in 2025, she was named the Editor of CENTRO Press, the book-making arm of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is the author of Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017), namesake of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. She is the editor of Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012); The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012); Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020); and, with Earl Fitz, Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas (2024). From 2021-2023, along with David Pullins, she co-curated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue, published in 2023. With Diasporic Blackness, she began a long-standing relationship with the Schomburg Center; she currently serves on its Centennial Advisory Board, and is co-editor, with Barrye Brown and Laura Helton, of a new book, Black Studies on 135th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection, coming in April 2026. In addition to her role at CENTRO Press, she is on the advisory board of Callaloo and Small Axe, and is the series editor of the Afro-Latinx Futures series at the State University of New York Press and a series co-editor, along with Nathan Dize and Annette Joseph-Gabriel, of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press. You can learn more about her by visiting her website https://drvkv23.com/ or following her on Instagram - @drvkv23.

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 Bianca Beauchemin, who teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her work seeks to disrupt the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, exploring how embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance, and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. In this conversation, we explore the particularities of Black Studies in a Canadian context, the place of gender and sexuality studies in work of Black study, and the complexity of thinking Canadian blackness.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Marlee S. Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and author whose work centers oral histories of Black educators, African American educational history, and culturally responsive teaching and leadership. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Bunch has over a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary contexts and has held leadership roles in curriculum development, educator preparation, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she also created two state-approved micro-credentials—one based on The Magnitude of Us and the other on Unlearning the Hush, designed to support educators’ culturally responsive practice through sustained, reflective learning.Dr. Bunch is the author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press), which received the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research, Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge). 

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 Ashon Crawley, who teaches in the Departments of Religious Studies and of African American Studies at University of Virginia. Along with his numerous scholarly essays and books Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016) and The Lonely Letters (2020), he is a widely exhibited and hosted multimedia artist. In this conversation, we explore the aesthetic and epistemological resonance of religious practice in Black study, the pleasures of adventurous multidisciplinary research, and the open horizons of pedagogical practice in the Black Studies tradition.

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 Tashal Brown, assistant professor of Urban Education and Secondary Social Studies in the College of Education at University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender in relation to equity and justice in educational contexts and how the cultivation and enactment of critical literacies and liberatory pedagogies across K–12 schools, community-based spaces, and teacher education shape the perspectives, experiences, and actions of youth and educators. In this conversation, we explore the centrality of the study of childhood in Black Studies, the place of education in the field, and the transformative power of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Black girlhood.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 conversation is with Hanna Garth, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, and was previously Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. She held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA, an MPH in Global Health from Boston University, and a BA from Rice University. She is a food anthropologist, broadly focused on how individuals and families navigate food systems in the service of their desires to eat in particular, culturally inflected ways. With critical attention to the granular, everyday experiences of navigating broader systems, her work links macro-scale structures to social and material impacts on life conditions. Her research asks questions like beyond our basic needs for survival, what does it take to live a decent life, and who gets to decide? Her work critically analyzes concepts like justice, interrogating how justice is understood and by whom it is defined? She interrogates concepts like food sovereignty and its possibilities in our contemporary globalized world. She is interested in how people build and maintain community and support networks within broader contexts of inequality and struggles for survival. She studies these issues in Latin America and the Caribbean and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. | 

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 Kimberly Blockett, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Delaware. Along with a number of scholarly articles in prominent journals, she has compiled the heavily annotated edition Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experiences, Ministerial Travels, and Labour’s of Mrs. Elaw (2021), edited the collection Mapping Black Women’s Geographies (2025), and the author of Race, Religion, and Rebellion: The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw (fall 2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of recovering lost voices in a multidisciplinary approach to history, the place of religion in Black study, and the exciting, productive, and imaginative messiness of Black Studies research.