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 Martha Biondi, Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Harvard, 2003), The Black Revolution on Campus (California, 2014), and a forthcoming book on Black internationalism. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of Black Studies as a field, the place of historical study in the field, and what questions remain to be asked, explored, and debated in a moment of political crisis.