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 episode features Rita Kiki Edozie, the Deval Patrick Endowed Chair of Political, Economic, and Social Innovation and Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is the university’s former interim Dean of the John W McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies. Her recent books, The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance (2014) and Pan-Africa Rising: The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business (2017), and Africa’s New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations (with Moses Khisa, 2022).