This is Brie Gorrell 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 Katherine Ponds, a late-doctoral candidate in the Department of American and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research explores the relationship between ancient Greek notions of the tragic and contemporary African American theater. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between classics and work in Black Studies, comparative work as Black study and scholarship, and the varied resonances of “the tragic” in descriptions of Black life in an antiblack world.