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 Sonya Donaldson, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Colby College. She works at the intersections of race, class, gender, and technologies and seeks to elucidate the relationship between race, diaspora, and nation. Her research interests include African American Literature, Black Digital Humanities, and Black German Studies. She is the creator of the digital humanities project, Singing the Nation [Into Being], a collection of performances of James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Donaldson is also the executive director of media and archives for the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) and a fellow at the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College. In this conversation, we discuss the place of community work inside and outside the Black Studies academy, literary studies and questions of digitality, and the expansive possibilities of the Black Studies classroom.