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 Gabrielle Williams, who teaches in the Department of Literary Studies at the New School for Social Research. She is a dancer and jazz vocalist whose scholarly work explores the question of hunger in Africana literature, a question that guides her book manuscript tentatively titled Starving from Satiety. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between embodiment, expressive culture, and Black Studies and how the study of Black life shifts and grounds the meaning of education and the imagination of the classroom.