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 Leonard McKinnis, who teaches in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Along with a number of scholarly pieces, he is the author of The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the place of religious studies in the Black Studies tradition, the relationship between ethnographic and historical research, and how close attention to emerging Black religious sensibilities reveal ethical and political visions to Black study.