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 Marisa Parham, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Maryland where she is also Director of African American and Experimental Digital Humanities and Associate Director of Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities. Along with numerous articles in scholarly and public facing venues, she is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture and co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. In this conversation, we discuss the formation of Black Studies between and beyond disciplines, the relation between skill acquisition and expressive culture in the field, and the centrality of collaborative, experimental work in the study of Black life.