You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Afro American Studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In addition to a number articles in scholarly journals and popular intellectual venues, he has written three books: We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989, published with New York University Press in 2019, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, published with Polity Press in 2021, and the book that occasions our conversation today: Of Black Study, published with Pluto Press in 2023.

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Autumn Womack, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where she teaches and writes on 19th and early 20th century African American literature and cultural history and where she has worked as part of the curatorial team at the Toni Morrison Papers project. She is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals as well as popular intellectual venues including LA Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. Autumn is the author of the book The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930, which is the occasion for our conversation that follows. The book was published by University of Chicago Press in 2022 and was the winner of the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize in 2023.

This discussion is with Dr. Mark W. Deets, an Assistant Professor of African and World History and the Director of the Center for American Studies and Research at The American University in Cairo. His research and teaching focus on 19 th and 20th century West African social and cultural history, especially in the Senegambian region. His first book, A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal, is published in 2023 with Ohio University Press. Dr.Deets has also published his work in The Journal of African History, History in Africa: A Journal of

Method, and the Africa Is A Country blog, among others. Dr. Deets serves as a book review editor for The Journal of West African History. He moved to Cairo in 2017 after obtaining his PhD in African history at Cornell University. He embarked on this academic career after 20

years as a helicopter pilot and a military diplomat in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a military attaché to the West African countries of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mauritania. In his final military assignment, Dr. Deets returned to his undergraduate alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, to teach History and to serve as the varsity wrestling officer representative. Dr. Deets grew up in the small town of Beloit, Kansas.