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 Natasha Henry-Dixon, who teaches in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Along with numerous scholarly and public-facing pieces, she is the author of Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (2010), Talking about Freedom (2012). She also maintains the website One Too Many: Black People Enslaved in Upper Canada, 1760-1834. In this conversation, we discuss the history of Black people in Canada, the complicated relationship between the four centuries of Black presence and the place of immigrants in the Black Canadian imagination, and the importance of public history, education, and Black study.