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 John Murillo III, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also serves as department chair. In addition to a number of articles in scholarly journals, he is the author of Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creations, published in 2021 by Ohio State University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the relation of physics, literary study, and conceptions of blackness in an antiblack world, the politics of Black Studies and the work of Black study, and how responsibility to community and to transformative political interruption is central to work in the field.