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 Elena Guzman, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. In addition to her critical writing and research in anthropology, which includes a book manuscript entitled Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean she is a filmmaker whose creative work explores “the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health.” In this conversation, we discuss the expansive possibilities of transdisciplinary thinking, the role of a Black Studies sensibility in anthropological research, and the place of creative work in the institutional life of Black Studies.

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 Christin Washington, a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland. Her interests lie at the intersection of Caribbean studies, the cultural labor of Black women’s religious practices, digital studies, and immersive forms of scholarship and and expressive work. In this conversation, we discuss the place of love and imagination in Black Studies, design as intellectual work, and digital studies as play, immersion, and meaning-making.

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 Walidah Imarisha, Director of the Center for Black Studies and Associate Professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. She is the co-editor of two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. She is also the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She spent 6 years with the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project as a public scholar facilitating programs across the state about Oregon Black history and other topics. In 2015, she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing. In this conversation, we discuss the political meaning of Black Studies, the place of speculative thinking and fiction in the field, and the forms of time appropriate to the study of Black life, history, and expressive culture.

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 Qiana Whitted, who teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature and in the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. In addition to numerous articles on African American literature and graphic culture, she is the author of three books - ‘A God of Justice?’: The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature (2009), EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (2019), Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023) - and is the editor, with Brannon Costello, of Comics and the U.S. South (2012). In this conversation, we discuss the place of material culture in Black Studies, the meaning of graphic and comic book representation of Black life, and how an expanding sense of a Black Studies archive impacts 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 LaToya Brackett, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She researches and publishes on questions of intercultural communication, diasporic identity and meaning, and popular cultural studies. In addition to her appointment as assistant professor, she is a member of the Race and Pedagogy Institute at UPS. This conversation explores how Black Studies shifts the meaning of academic social space, intellectual space, and transforms our sense of classroom pedagogy.

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 Christina Knight, who teaches in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. Christina received her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University. Her work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently at work on a manuscript, The Ship That is the Body: The Middle Passage in Time-Based Art, which investigates contemporary black American performing and visual arts that reimagine the history of the Atlantic slave trade. In this conversation, we discuss the place of expressive culture in Black Studies, how embodiment challenges conventions in scholarship, the profession, and in the classroom, and how time and physics recalibrate our understanding of blackness.

Our discussion refers to her short film doomsday : fieldnotes, which can viewed on YouTube.

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 Minkah Makalani, who teaches in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University where he is also the director of the Center for Africana Studies. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 and the co-editor with Davarian L. Baldwin of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. In this conversation, we discuss his journey into and interest in the field of Black Studies, the importance of political and historical dimensions to Black study, and the place of internationalist discourse 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 Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles and edited collections, he is the author of What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2001), Songs in the Key of Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013), Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (2022), and the groundbreaking work The New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity, published in 2005 and reissued as a second edition in 2015. He is also the host of the long-running series Left of Black, a series of discussions of popular culture and scholarly treatments of Black life. In this conversation, we discuss his entry into Black Studies, the place of popular cultural study in the field’s past and future, and the complex relationship between scholarly work and the everyday lives of Black people.