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 Noliwe Rooks, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University where she is also founding director of the Segrenomics Lab. Her work is widely engage with African American women’s history, education, and cultural studies and she is the author of a number of books, including most recently A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune (2024) and Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (2025). In this discussion, we explore the relation of intellectual work to political struggle, the history and intellectual tradition of the field, and how the future of Black Studies is shaped and reshaped by contemporary concerns.