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.

Today's conversation is with Lisa Ze Winters, Associate Professor of African American Studies and English and Associate Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Currently, she is consumed with the day-to-day practice of mothering a Black girl in the time of now, and her current research interests center on Black motherhood and Black radical love and the possibilities therein in for imagining and enacting freedom for Black children. Her most recent essay, “Fugitive Motherhood, Maroon Revisions, and Otherwise Possibilities in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter” (J19, 2024), examines Brown’s theorization of the ontological labor of enslaved mothering and the revolutionary possibilities of fugitivity and marronage for the fugitive mother Clotel. Ze Winters is the author of The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (2016, UGA Press)