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 Michael E. Sawyer, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles and books, including An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (2018), Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (2020), and a pair of forthcoming works - The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black(spring 2025) and Sir Lewis, a critical book on Lewis Hamilton (also spring 2025). In this conversation, we explore the place of speculative work in the Black Studies tradition, the expansiveness of Black critical inquiry, and the meaning of the multiple disciplinary interventions that comprise the field’s past, present, and future.