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 Jeanelle Hope, who teaches in and is Director of the program in African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is co-author with Bill V. Mullen of The Black Antifascist Tradition (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the anti-fascist theory and practice in the Black Studies tradition, comparative racial and ethnic study, and the importance of critical theoretical work in the history and future of the field.