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 La TaSha Levy, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Howard University. Her research focuses on the fraught place of Black conservatism in the history of African American political life and dissent. She is also the founder of Black Star Rising, a Black Studies curricula and consulting enterprise focused on expanding access to Black Studies beyond the ivory tower. She provides professional development training and Black history curricula for schools and school districts and collaborates with dedicated teachers on K-12 instruction in Black Studies and Ethnic Studies. Since 2022, she has served as scholar-in-residence with A Long Talk About the Uncomfortable Truth, an antiracist activation experience. Prior to graduate study, La TaSha taught Humanities at Maya Angelou Public Charter High School in D.C., which was co-founded by James Forman, Jr. She also has experience working in Student Affairs, having served as the director of the Luther P. Jackson Black Cultural Center at the University of Virginia. 

In this conversation, we discuss the singular contributions of the field of Black Studies, its internal debates and conflicts, and how Black Studies remains a centerpiece for understanding liberation struggle in a time of deep political crisis.