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 Professor Minkah Makalani, who teaches in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University where he is also the director of the Center for Africana Studies. He is the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 and the co-editor with Davarian L. Baldwin of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. In this conversation, we discuss his journey into and interest in the field of Black Studies, the importance of political and historical dimensions to Black study, and the place of internationalist discourse in the field.