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.