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 Seulghee Lee, who teaches in the Departments of English  and African American Studies at University of South Carolina. In addition to a number of scholarly pieces, he is the author of OtherLovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (2025) and co-editor with Rebecca Kumar of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between literary and expressive culture in Black Studies, comparative racial and ethnic study, and the importance of critical theoretical work in the history and future of the field.