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 discussion is with Jeffery Ogbar, who teaches in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut where he is also the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music. He is the author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (2004) and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (2007), as well as editor of Civil Rights: Problems in American Civilization (Houghton Mifflin 2003), The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts and Letters (2010), and co-editor with Erica R. Edwards and Roderick A. Ferguson of Keywords for African American Studies (2018). In this conversation, we discuss the place of history in the field of Black Studies and the importance of a Black Studies understanding of historical research in times of political crisis.