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 Alex Lubin, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Penn State University and is the president-elect of the American Studies Association. His work is informed by cultural studies and history, with specific focus on North Africa and the Arab world more broadly. He is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1956, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary, and Never-Ending War on Terror, and is completing a book entitled Third World Ensemble: African Americans in Cairo Between the Suez and Six-Day Wars. In this discussion, we explore the place of transnational study in Black Studies, the new horizons opened up by the study of non-Atlantic routes of diaspora, and the fecundity of Black study as an undisciplined, expansive, and curious practice.