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 Chad L. Williams, Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (2010), which won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and a 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (2023), and he is also coeditor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (2016).