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 Mari Crabtree, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Emerson College in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is the author of My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (2022) and is currently working on two book-length projects: Co-Opted: Essays on Black Studies and Ethical Praxis in the Age of Neoliberalism and Guile: The Pleasures and Political Utility of Subversion in the African American Cultural Tradition. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies informs her conception of writing history, the place of politics and culture in the field, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape thinking, pedagogy, and everyday practice.