The Black Studies Podcast

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, graduate 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 Charrise Barron, who teaches in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she is an affiliate in African and African American Studies and with the Harvard Data Science Initiative. A practicing gospel artist, she has written scholarly pieces and is the author of the forthcoming The Platinum Age of Gospel: The Years When Crossover Music Changed Everything (2026). In this conversation, we discuss sound and sonic culture, religion and the African American tradition, and the place of religious studies in the Black Studies work.

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, graduate 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 Alessandra Raengo, who teaches in the School of Film, Media, and Theater at Georgia State University. Along with many essays on Black cinema and aesthetics, she is the author of two books, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (2013) and Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (2016), as well as founding editor in chief of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. In this conversation, we discuss cinema and media work, the politics of art and culture, and the place of the aesthetic in the Black Studies tradition.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Alex Gil, who teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he conducts introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly,  co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

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, graduate 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 Samantha Pinto, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Texas, Austin. Along with many essays on African American literature and Black feminism, she is the co-editor with Alexandra S. Moore of Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies (2020) and with Jennifer C. Nash of The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (2023), and the author of three books: Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013), Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (2020), and Inside the Body of Black Feminism: Science, Race, Culture (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of cultural meaning, literary studies and expressive culture, and the enigma of program building in multi-disciplinary project of Black Studies.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Zahra Caldwell, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic and Gender Studies Department at Westfield State University. She is an interdisciplinary cultural historian who teaches in the fields of History, Black Studies, and Women’s Studies. Her professional, community, and academic work is focused on unpacking and expanding the definition of resistance within the long struggle for African American freedom, particularly regarding African American women, artistic labor, and inventive activism. Her research includes African American women’s history, the cultural labor of African Americans and women, and twentieth-century Black radicalism. She has published work on Black cultural luminaries such as Hazel Scott, Prince, Elizabeth Catlett, and Beyoncé. She is the author of “The Fiercest Kind: Five Black Women in Art, Performance, and Resistance 1937-1965” (UMass Press, 2026), which looks at the contributions and challenges of Black women activist-artists in the mid 20th century.

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, graduate 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 Will Mosley, who teaches in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland.He has published widely in scholarly venues on Black feminism, cultural studies, and queer theory and is the author of the book Tenderness: The Work of Black Queer Expression, forthcoming with Duke University Press. In this conversation, we discuss Black study and pedagogy, how Black life expands expressive culture and fashions new critical tools, and the productive intersections of Black Studies and queer history.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, who teaches in the Religious Studies department at Stanford University, where she is also an affiliate of the department of African and African American Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her first book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC Press, 2021) is a gendered history of enslaved people’s religiosity from the colonial period to the onset of the Civil War. It won the 2022 prize for the Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion, as well as the Outstanding First Book Prize and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). The book was also a finalist for the 2022 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at Yale University and named a “Best Book of 2021” by Publisher’s Weekly. 

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Forum for Theological Education, among others. Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh is currently at work on her second monograph tentatively titled American Fetish:Witchcraft and the Invention of Black Women in the Era of Slavery, an anthology of documents on religion and slavery, and an edited collection on African American religious history. A historian of Atlantic slavery and religion, she sits on the advisory board of a number of digital history projects, journals, and museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History’s Commission of Religious Practitioners and Scholars (CORPS) and the National Museum of American Religion. 

This is Ashley Newby 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 Earl Brooks, Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He teaches courses in sound studies, African American rhetorical traditions, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and composition. His recent book, On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press), examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music.

His work also appears in Sounding Out!, Rhetoric Review, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Langston Hughes Review, and College Composition and Communication. Brooks is also a proud alumnus of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, and he serves as a UMBC McNair Faculty Mentor and advisory board member. 

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, graduate 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 Yveline Alexis, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Oberlin College.She is an historian with interests in memory studies, oral histories, and archive work, with particular focus on the politics of Haitian resistance to occupation among intellectuals, artists, and religious figures. She is the author of a number of articles as well the book Haiti Fights Back: The Life & Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the urgency of multilingual research, the virtues of disorderly methods, and the expansive vision of historical work in Black Studies.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Shana L. Redmond, who teachings in the Department of English at Columbia University. She is a Grammy-nominated creator, writer, and scholar of race, culture, and power. She is the author of two acclaimed books: Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU, 2014) and the multi-award winning, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020). A 2023 Guggenheim fellow, her current project is a forensic listening to Black life before mourning. She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University in New York City where she tends the open collaborative, The Radio in the Orchard (TRiO).