This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 Rebecca Wanzo, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of Black study, the place of graphic and popular arts in Black Studies research, and the relevance of critical theoretical work for the field.