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 Scot Brown, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. A working musician and public commentator on Black culture and politics, he is the author of a number of popular and scholarly works including the 2005 book Fighting for Us, published by New York University Press. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry, the relationship between cultural production and Black life, and the meaning of music and musical practice in the Black intellectual tradition.

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 Shaida Akbarian, who teaches in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, where she also earned her PhD in African American and African Studies. In this conversation, we discuss the complex meanings of Black Studies as an intellectual tradition, a political disposition, and the various impasses and hesitations that lie at the heart of the relation between those two aspects of the field.

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 David Green, who teaches in the Department of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where he also directs the first year writing program. In addition to a number of articles on critical writing and race, he is the editor of Visions and Cyphers, a writing studies textbook that emphasizes culture and language research in composition studies. In this conversation, we discuss the place of language and writing in the Black Studies tradition, the function of expressive life in the field, and the future horizons of critical inquiry into Black life.

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 two of the founding members of the newly launched Department of African Diaspora Studies at Grinnell College: Makeba Lavan and Stephanie Jones. Professor Lavan teaches in the English department at Grinnell with a special interest in afrofuturist literature and culture. Professor Jones teaches in the Education Studies department with a focus on the relation between race, curriculum, and trauma in Black students. In this conversation we discuss their journeys into an abiding concern with Black life, what sustains that concern, and how multiple disciplinary approaches to Black Studies expand and deepen the field.

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 J. Marlena Edwards. She is assistant professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History, having completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Africana Research Center at Penn State after earning a dual-major Ph.D. in African American and African Studies and History from Michigan State University. Her research interests include multiethnic African American identities, Cape Verdean and Afro-Caribbean migration, U.S. Immigration, and African diaspora histories. She's working on her first book documenting West Indian and Cape Verdean Immigrant communities and their lives after whaling in early twentieth century New England.

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 Michael E. Sawyer, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles and books, including An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (2018), Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (2020), and a pair of forthcoming works - The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black(spring 2025) and Sir Lewis, a critical book on Lewis Hamilton (also spring 2025). In this conversation, we explore the place of speculative work in the Black Studies tradition, the expansiveness of Black critical inquiry, and the meaning of the multiple disciplinary interventions that comprise the field’s past, present, and future.

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 Dominick Quinney, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. In this discussion, we explore the origins of his interest in the field, relations of research and pedagogy, and the relationship between the study of Black life and the future of disciplines, area studies, and the transformative meaning of education.

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 John Murillo III, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as department chair. In addition to a number of articles in scholarly journals, he is the author of Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creations, published in 2021 by Ohio State University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the relation of physics, literary study, and conceptions of blackness in an antiblack world, the politics of Black Studies and the work of Black study, and how responsibility to community and to transformative political interruption is central to work in the field.