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 discussion is with Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean and Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland. Shel was appointed Dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities in 2011, having joined the university in 1991 as Professor and served as Chair of the Women’s Studies department for eight years. A pioneering scholar on the intersections of race, class and gender in the U.S. with an emphasis on African-American women, work and families, she is founding director of both the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at UMD. Her scholarship includes three books and numerous articles.

She is former president of the National Women’s Studies Association; former vice president of the American Sociological Association; and former chair of the Committee of Scholars for Ms. magazine.