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 Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., who is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing essays, he is the author of a number of books including most recently An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion (2018), Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020), and We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For (2024). He also maintains a Substack newsletter under the title A Native Son. In this conversation, we discuss the place of religious studies in the field of Black Studies, the impact of pragmatism, prophetic work, and political thinking on reckoning with Black life, and the complex methods, critical frames, and sensibilities that comprise the field.