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.

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 Deirdre Cooper Owens, who teaches in the Department of History with an appointment in the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. In addition to a number of scholarly and public scholarship writings, Cooper Owens is the author of the immensely important book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, published by University of Georgia Press in 2018. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies from the perspective of race and gender history and historical writing, the question of sources and source material for such writing, and how the study of Black life speaks to the future of intellectual and cultural life in a time of political crisis.

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 Martha Biondi, Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Harvard, 2003), The Black Revolution on Campus (California, 2014), and a forthcoming book on Black internationalism. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of Black Studies as a field, the place of historical study in the field, and what questions remain to be asked, explored, and debated in a moment of political crisis.

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 four members of the Department of African and African American Studies at Michigan State University: Ruth Nicole Brown (current chair of the department), Suban Nur Cooley, LeConté Dill, and Yvonne Morris. In this discussion, we explore the meaning of Black Studies for thinking community, gender, sexuality, and the past and future of Black survival and thriving.

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 Austin Jackson, who teaches in the non-fiction writing program in the Department of English at Brown University. From the faculty page, Jackson's "teaching and research areas include rhetoric and composition, critical race studies, and qualitative research in English education. His original research has been published by the National Council of Teachers of English Press/Routledge, The International Journal of Africana Studies, Reading Research Quarterly, The Black Scholar, American Language Review, and Stanford University's Black Arts Quarterly. In 2014, Bedford/St. Martin's Press published his co-edited anthology, Students' Right to Their Own Language: A Critical Sourcebook. The book, co-edited with Staci Perryman-Clark and David Kirkland, collects perspectives from some of the field's most influential scholars to provide a foundation for understanding the historical and theoretical context informing the affirmation of all students' right to exist in their own languages. Austin is an editorial board member of the Journal of Teaching Writing and a member of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Language Policy Committee.

Austin previously served as an Assistant Director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, where he administered Brown’s Writing Center, the Writing Fellows Program, and the Excellence At Brown Pre-Orientation Program (2018-2021). Before coming to Brown, Austin held academic appointments as an Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric in Transcultural Contexts and Core Faculty in the Muslim Studies Program and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. He also served as Director of the My Brother's and Sister's Keeper Program, an award-winning mentoring and service-learning initiative for adolescent youth attending Detroit Public Schools. In 2016, he established the My Brother's Keeper Prison Outreach Program, a peer-mentoring program for inmates at the Richard A. Handlon Men's Correctional Facility, Ionia, MI."

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 Mary Hicks, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches the history of the Black Atlantic and Latin America. Her research has been published in Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Global Slavery, and a number of collections on slavery, the Atlantic world, and the meaning of Black history. She is the author of Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press. In this conversation, we discuss the past and future of Black Studies with particular attention to questions of language, everyday life as a form of resistance, and how the field of Black Studies calls us to rethink what we mean by archives and archival sources.

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 Utz McKnight, Professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama, where he teaches courses on political theory in a Black Studies context. McKnight is the author of four books: Political Liberalism and the Politics of Race (1996), The Everyday Practice of Race in America: Ambiguous Privilege (2010), Race and the Politics of the Exception: Equality, Sovereignty, and American Democracy (2013), and most recently Frances E.W. Harper: A Call to Conscience (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the power of Black Studies for thinking nation, community, and democracy and the challenges of questions of diversity, class, and gender in the field.