This is Ashley Newby 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 Professor Jakeya Caruthers, who teaches in the Departments of English and Africana Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Caruthers' teaching and research focuses on black political aesthetics in 20th and 21st century cultural production and on the study of race, gender, sexuality, and state discipline. She is working on a book-length project that examines literature and performance to explore the ways black folks manage racial terror through a sense of humor endowed with black feminist affects like curiosity or a sense of political legitimacy imagined to be possible even among morally, materially, and politically opposing figures. Her recent collaborative projects also include a digital archive of feminist decriminalization campaigns as well as a co-edited double-volume anthology entitled Abolition Feminisms (Haymarket Books).