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 Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who teaches in Black Studies at University of Rochester where he is the founding Chair of the department. He is the author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (2014) and co-editor of  Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019). In this episode, we discuss Black Studies, gender, sexuality, and the politics of thinking and doing Black study in the current political moment.