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 J. Marlena Edwards. She is assistant professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History, having completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Africana Research Center at Penn State after earning a dual-major Ph.D. in African American and African Studies and History from Michigan State University. Her research interests include multiethnic African American identities, Cape Verdean and Afro-Caribbean migration, U.S. Immigration, and African diaspora histories. She's working on her first book documenting West Indian and Cape Verdean Immigrant communities and their lives after whaling in early twentieth century New England.