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 Jervette R. Ward, who teaches in and chairs the newly re-established Department of Black Studies at The City College of New York. In addition to her writing and editing work on African American literature and popular culture, she serves as president of the College Language Association. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between Black studies and literature, how the past struggles to establish the field inform ongoing Black liberation struggle, and how the past and future of Black Studies engages with community life and its everyday habits, objects, and complex practices.