This is John Drabinski 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, 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 Huey Hewitt, a late-stage doctoral student in the Department of African American Studies at Harvard University. Hewitt is a graduate of the Department of Black Studies at Amherst College, in which he wrote a lengthy thesis on Black trans incarceration and which was awarded highest honors. At Harvard, Hewitt has continued to interrogate the intersections of race, class, and gender identity in the context of mass incarceration and the police state and is currently composing a doctoral dissertation of key figures in the Black anarchist tradition. In this conversation, we explore the relation of Hewitt’s interests and research to the past of Black Studies and what that research might mean for creating and sustaining new horizons in the field.