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.

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author most recently of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration and of the more recent Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake, which was published by New York University Press in April 2025.