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 Courtney Joseph, who teaches in the departments of History and African American Studies at Lake Forest College. In addition to a number of reviews and scholarly essays, she is completing a book on the Haitian diaspora in Chicago, Illinois entitled Invisibly Visible: A Community History of Haitians in Chicago. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between scholarly research and political communities, the place of historical methods in Black Studies, and how the study of Haiti and the diaspora speaks to the future of the field.