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 Yveline Alexis, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Oberlin College.She is an historian with interests in memory studies, oral histories, and archive work, with particular focus on the politics of Haitian resistance to occupation among intellectuals, artists, and religious figures. She is the author of a number of articles as well the book Haiti Fights Back: The Life & Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the urgency of multilingual research, the virtues of disorderly methods, and the expansive vision of historical work 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 Shana L. Redmond, who teachings in the Department of English at Columbia University. She is a Grammy-nominated creator, writer, and scholar of race, culture, and power. She is the author of two acclaimed books: Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU, 2014) and the multi-award winning, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020). A 2023 Guggenheim fellow, her current project is a forensic listening to Black life before mourning. She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University in New York City where she tends the open collaborative, The Radio in the Orchard (TRiO).

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 Mabel Wilson, who teaches in the Departments of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio&, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal, and desire. She was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (2020) at the University of Virginia.  For the Museum of Modern Art, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). Wilson has published Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She is currently developing the manuscript for her third book Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and American Civic Architecture.

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 Brandon Byrd, who teaches in the Departments of History and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a historian of Black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on the United States and Haiti. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti and the co-editor of two books, Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History and Haiti for the Haitians.

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 James Smethurst, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Along with many essays on African American music, history, and culture, he is the author of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (2003), The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011), Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity (2020) and co-editor with Chris Green and Rachel Rubin of Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (2006) and co-editor with John Bracey and Sonia Sanchez of SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014). In this conversation, we discuss the politics of African American history, cultural studies, and the place of music in Black Studies methodology and in 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 Marcia Chatelain, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  Previously, she was a Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and a Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.  She is a proud native of Chicago, Illinois, and I'm an even prouder graduate of the following schools: St. Ignatius College Prep, the University of Missouri-Columbia (B.A. Journalism/Religious Studies), and Brown University (A.M. and Ph.D., American Civilization). She has been honored to be named a Harry S. Truman Scholar (2000), Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life Amethyst Award recipient (2009), German Marshall Fund of the U.S. American Fellow (2011), Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow (2012), French American Foundation Young Leader (2015),  and National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow (2017-2018).  Her teaching has been recognized with Georgetown University's  Dorothy M. Brown Teaching Award (2014), the Edward Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence (2015), and the College Academic Council's Faculty Award (2016).  In 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education named me a Top Influencer in Higher Education in recognition of my curation of #FergusonSyllabus, a response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.  She is a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. Her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won several awards including a 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2019-2021 Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award from Harvard’s Business History Review, the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History, the 2021 Organization of American Historians Lawrence W. Levine Award, the  2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, and the 2020 Hooks National Book Award.

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 Yvonne Chireau, Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies and Professor Emeritus of Religion at Swarthmore College.  She is the author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003) and the co-editor of Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism (1999). Her current book project is called Graphic Voodoo: Black Religion in the Comic Book Imaginary. Dr. Chireau lives in Delaware County, Pennsylvania with her beloved family and a three-legged cat. Her writings on the intersections of magic, Africana religions, and popular culture tropes of Voodoo can be found online at The Academic Hoodoo (academichoodoo.com). 

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 Régine Jean-Charles, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Along with many essays on Black feminism, Haiti, and Caribbean literature, she is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014), Martin Luther King and the Trumpet of Conscience Today (2021), Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022). In this conversation, we discuss Caribbean literary studies, the experience and history of Haiti in a Black Studies frame, and the place of teaching and community work in our commitments to Black 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 Paula C. Austin, who teaches in the Department of African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. She is a U.S. historian with a focus on African American history, the history of race and racism, visual culture, urban and women’s history, history of social science, and the history of childhood. She is particularly interested in interiority and broadening the narrow definitions of intellectual history. Her book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press) is a social and intellectual history of poor and working class young black people in early twentieth century, racially segregated Washington, D.C. As an undergraduate, she was trained as a creative writer and developed her teaching pedagogy in adult basic education classrooms in New York City. In 2016, she was the co-editor of Radical Teacher (Vol 106), special issue on “Teaching #BlackLivesMatter,” and is the author of “‘Conscious Self-Realization and Self-Direction’: New Negro Ideologies and the Confines of Visual Representation,” in Journal of African American History (Summer 2018). She has an article in Gender, Women, and Families of Color, and was a contributing author to Colonize This! Young women of color on today’s feminism, eds. Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman, (Seal Press, 2002, 2019). She was also the CUNY Graduate Center inaugural archival fellow at NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a Jackie McLean Fellow at the University of Hartford. She has served as diversity faculty fellow for professional development at the Center for Teaching and Learning and with the Division of Inclusive Excellence at California State University, Sacramento.Paula Austin shared some of her most recent research on the Black youths of Jim Crow-era Washington, DC, in a video for CAS’s new series, The Journey: How New Ideas Are Born.

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 Malika Imhotep, who is assistant professor of Global African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College. The central focus of their research is an application of Black feminist political economy to literal and figurative representations of transgressive Black femininities in folk cultures, aesthetic traditions, and resistance histories throughout the Global Black South. To that end, their forthcoming academic monograph explores these themes through the folkloric figure of the “tar baby.” They are also the author of the poetry collection gossypiin (2022), a co-convenor of The Church of Black feminist Thought ,and a member of The Black Aesthetic curatorial collective. Their writing has been featured in The Guggenheim Museum, The Academy of American Poets, Women & Performance, The Drama Review, Palimpsest, and several anthologies.  In this conversation, we discuss the complexity of intellectual work and cultural life, gender and blackness in a diasporic gram, and the place of creative work 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 Ezinwanne ‘Ezi’ Odozor, Nigerian Canadian writer, higher education professional, and anti-racist practitioner, Njoki Wane, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto, and Janelle Brady, assistant professor in the School of Early Childhood studies at Toronto Metropolitan 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 Alix Chapman, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. His research and teaching interests include Black Queer Studies, Black Feminism, and anthropology and is the author of Raising the Bottom: Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between activism and intellectual life, sexuality and blackness, and the place of ethnographic methods 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 Jonathan Howard, who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support fromthe Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be found at Callaloo, Souls, Atlantic Studies, and Transition Magazine. His first, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the water as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that the blackness which dawned in the oceanic encounter of Middle Passage is best apprehended not as social death but ecological 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 Meredith Gadsby, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Oberlin College. Along with essays on migration, literature, and identity, she is the author of Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival (2006) and co-editor of Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (2003). In this conversation, we discuss the politics of Black study inside and outside the academy, the complexity of thinking diaspora, and the place of literary work 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 Errol Henderson, an Independent Scholar who previously served as an associate professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He earned a PhD in Political Science at University of Michigan with a concentration in World Politics after graduating magna cum laude from Wayne State University. He was the first—and for nearly 20 years—the only tenured African American professor in the Political Science Department at Penn State University. He has authored more than 50 scholarly publications including 5 books; and has an international reputation as a scholar of war. He helped lead the UCAR/BAMIII student protest in 1986-7; and the eleven-day “Study-In” building occupation at Wayne State in 1989. He is working on two books: (1) on the role of white supremacism in world politics; and (2) on black women and the Urban Peace and Justice Movement of the 1980s-90s.

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 widerange 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 between John E. Drabinski and Ashley Newby, both of whom teach in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Maryland, As co-founders and co-hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, our discussion in this episode reflects on the moment of the podcast’s 300th episode, guided by questions sent to us by podcast listeners over social media. We explore how work on the podcast has impacted our understanding of Black Studies, how the podcast has enhanced our teaching and pedagogy, what moments stand out for us across the 300 episodes, feedback we have received from colleagues and listeners, and what hopes we have for the future of the project.

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 Wendy M. Thompson, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at California State University, San Jose. She is a researcher in African American history and cultural studies and is a practicing poet whose debut collection Black California Gold was published in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the undisciplined character of Black Studies, the place of the creative voice in Black Studies writing, and the importance of writing from a sense of place.

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 Zandria F. Robinson, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a writer and ethnographer working on race, gender, sound, and spirit at the crossroads of the living and the dead. A native Memphian and classically trained violinist, Robinson earned the Bachelor of Arts in Literature and African American Studies and the Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Memphis and the Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from Northwestern University. Dr. Robinson’s first book, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) won the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second monograph, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter (UCLA), won the 2018 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title and the Robert E. Park Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

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 Cisco Bradley, who teaches in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. He an award-winning author, film director, and screenwriter. He is a scholar of the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the African diaspora as well as a cultural theorist and historical ethnographer. Since 2011, his work has focused on music and migration, particularly as it has manifested in the United States. His current research focuses on tracing the oral transmission of African music in North America and the Caribbean from the 16th century to the present. His work has been widely reviewed in scholarly journals, the LA Review of Books, The Wire, and other publications. He has been awarded the Digital Studies Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, a literary grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and a dissertation fellowship from the Fulbright Program.He is the director of the Music and Migration Lab at the Pratt Institute. The lab is composed of an international team of researchers who work at the intersection between migration/mobility studies and music studies. Together with partners at New York University, Rutgers University, City University of New York, University of Geneva, University of Birmingham, University of Sydney, Griffith University, independent scholars, and musicians, the lab collects and preserves oral histories and leads mapping projects related to national and global cultural movements. The lab has recorded over 500 oral history interviews with more ongoing. Some of the interviews appear on Jazz Right Now which Prof. Bradley founded in 2013.

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 Courtney Patterson-Faye, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Wesleyan University. In addition to essays on Black feminist theory, fat studies, and sexuality and cultural studies, she is the author of The Body Contract: Black Women, Culture, and the Impossibilities of Fatness, forthcoming on NYU Press. In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of Black study, the relevance of Black Fat Studies for the field, and how Black Studies makes critical interventions inside disciplines.

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 Nikki L. Brown who teaches in the Departments of History and of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.  She works on race, representation, and African American history of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Brown is working on several projects currently: a manuscript on the photographs of the Louisiana’s civil rights movement; two digital archives, Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1880 to 1950, and Cataloguing Jim Crow in Kentucky; and a translation of the memoir of Afro-Turkish political leader Mustafa Olpak in conjunction with online oral history project of the Afro-Turks. The last project on the Afro Turks won a summer stipend grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities. 

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 Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, who teaches in the Department of History at Texas Southern University She is a fifth-generation Texan and the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in the field of history from a Texas institution (Rice University). Her research focuses on African American women’s intellectual history, African American religion, and topics in the African Diaspora.  Her edited works include Recovering Five Generations Hence:  The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace (Texas A&M University Press, 2013) and Angie Brown (Outskirts Press, 2017). Kossie-Chernyshev is the founding director of SWATH, an interdisciplinary summer workshop on African American Texas History for local K-16 teachers, works on the board of the Harris County historical commission, is founder of the Lillian B Horace symposium, serves as executive director of USLEEP America, and just celebrated her 50th year as a church musician.

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 Leigh Raiford, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to a number of critical essays in edited collections and journals, she is co-editor of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017) and the author of both Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013) and When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the political and cultural origins of the field, the place of art in the history of Black study, and the analytical and imaginative dimensions 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 Mark Campbell, who teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at University of Toronto, Scarborough. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations, hip-hop archives and notions of the human. Dr. Campbell is currently the Principal Investigator in the SSHRC funded research project, Black  Sonic Knowledges: Amplifying Black Canadian Musical Legacies and founder at Northside Hip-Hop Archive. He leads The Afrosonic Innovation Lab, a team of artists, creatives, and scholars actively engaged in sound experimentation, music-making and musicological analysis across the African diaspora. His recent books include the monograph AfroSonic Life (2022), the co-edited collection of essays, We Still Here: Hip Hop in North of the 49th Parallel published (in 2020) and the co-edited collection Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production with Murray Forman (in 2023).

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.

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 Nadia Alahmed, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Dickinson College.Her research centers on the historical, political and cultural connections between Middle East and Black America. Her book Black Intifada: a Century of Black and Palestinian Solidarity is forthcoming in 2027 and she is at work on a second book tentatively titled Afro-Arabs and the Changing Discourse on Race and Ethnicity in Middle East and North Africa, which explores ethno-racial formations in the region. In this conversation, we discuss political and cultural history, the possibilities of Black-Arab solidarity, and the meaning of scholarship and activist practice 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 A.D. Carson, who teachings in the Department of Music at University of Virginia. His work as a rapper, educator, writer, and commentator deals with race, place, history, literature, hip hop, rhetorics & performance. His books include Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, COLD, and The City. His mixtape, i used to love to dream, was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. It received a Prose Award (Best eProduct) from the Association of American Publishers and was a finalist for the Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award from the American Council of Learned Societies.His work has been published by The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, SPIN, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, NPR’s Code Switch, Bleacher Report, and Scalawag and has been featured by Complex, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, NPR’s All Things Considered, OkayPlayer, Time, USA Today, and XXL. His recent audio projects, including Owning My Masters (Mastered) and V: ILLICIT, are available to stream/download free from aydeethegreat.com.

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 Ousmane Power-Greene, who teaches in the Department of History at Clark University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, he is the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (2014), the novel The Confessions of Matthew Strong (2022), and is currently completing a book-length study of Hubert Harrison, Black radical thought, and African American emigration movements. In this conversation, we discuss intellectual work and its impact on Black politics, the relationship between art and political life, and how creative work and historical writing intertwine in a Black Studies context.

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 Dylan Penningroth, who teaches in the Department of History at University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His newest book is entitled Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). It explores how ordinary Black people used and thought about law in their everyday lives, and how Black legal activity and Black legal thought helped shape American law and Black social movements from the 1830s to the 1970s. The book tries to recover a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle. Before the Movement was awarded eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more.He has written on a wide range of themes, from the troubled history of race in contract law to the history of police power to the legacy of slavery in Ghana, to how Black churches used civil rights. My first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation

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 Jessica Millward, who teaches in the Departments of History and African American Studies at University of California, Irvine. Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, she is the author of Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (2015). In this conversation, we discuss race and gender, archival work, and the complex task of writing African American women’s history in a Black Studies context.

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 Karla FC Holloway, Professor Emeritus in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Duke University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles and edited collections, she is the author of a number of critical and literary pieces: The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (1987), New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Bi-Racial and Bi-Cultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (with Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, 1987), Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature (1991), Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (1996),  Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial (2002), Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White A Memoir (2006), Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (2011), Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2013), and the novels A Death in Harlem (2019) and Gone Missing in Harlem (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of African American literature in Black study, the complicated history of institutionalization of the field, and the importance of memoir and creative work 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 Kevin Holt, who teaches in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University. His research blends historical study, cultural studies, and the place of hip hop in contemporary race, politics, and identity discourse. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of musicological research in Black Studies, the expansive meaning and significance of hip hop, and the place of local and regional histories in cultural 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 Maurice J. Hobson, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Georgia State University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, he is the author of The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (2019) and co-author of With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity (2025). In this conversation, we discuss community and academic work, the history, politics, and culture of Black study, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape writing intellectual and popular history.

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 M. Wright, who teaches in the Department of English at Emory University where she is Emory University College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English. Along with numerous scholarly articles, she is co-editor with Maria Fernandez and Faith Wilding of Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (2003), co-editor with Antje Schuhmann of Blackness and Sexualities (2007), and the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004), Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015). With Jodi Byrd, she is also co-editor of the book series "Critical Insurgencies" from Northwestern University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of nation in theorizing and practicing Black Studies, the role of critical theoretical inquiry in Black study, and the expansiveness of the very idea of blackness.

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 Chrystel Oloukoï, who teaches in the Department of Geography at University of Washington and who will be a CIFAR Global Studies Scholar from 2026-2028. Their research focuses on cinema studies, urban politics and history, and the place of gender and sexuality in Black life across the diaspora. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies questions challenge languages of nation and state, the complicated stories of diaspora and Black identity, and the expansive politics of Black Studies sensibilities and critical frames.

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 Zana Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersections of visual culture, contemporary Black Art, media, and technology with an emphasis on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in how Black artists and cultural producers use visual technologies in their image-making practices to shape political consciousness and cultural memory, document, and reimagine Black social life. In this conversation, we explore the link between histories of struggle and Black Studies practice, the encoding of blackness in popular and visual culture, and the past and future of community work as constitutive of 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 writer and critic Dionne Ford. In addition to a number of pieces in popular and writerly venues, she is co-editor with Jill Strauss of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the role of study in creative writing, the place of memoir and storytelling in the study of Black life, and the intimacy and social significance of Black 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 Jarvis Givens, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and School of Education at Harvard University. Along with a number of essays in popular and academic venues, he is co-editor of "We Dare Say Love": Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys (2018) and author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the place of education and education writing in African American history, the culture and politics of Black study, and the imperative for Black Studies to impact community educational spaces.

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.