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 Charisse Burden-Stelly, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In addition to a number of scholarly essays, popular writings, and hosted podcast series, she is the author of two books - W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History from 2019, co-written with Gerald Horne, and Black Scare, Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States from 2023 - and is the co-editor of two volumes: with Percy Hintzen and Aaron Kamugisha, Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State and with Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings, published in 2022. In this conversation, we explore the complex political meaning of Black Studies as a site of resistance and also an institutionalized field of study, the relation of politics to intellectual inquiry, and the meaning of the multiple disciplinary interventions that comprise the field’s past, present, and future.