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 J Finley, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Pomona College. In addition to scholarly and public facing articles, she is author of Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity, published in 2024 by University of North Carolina Press. In this conversation, we discuss comedy and its politics, the relationship between intellectual life and political work, and the transformative work of Black Studies education.

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 Carol D. Lee, Professor Emerita and the former Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education in the School of Education and Social Policy and in African-American Studies at Northwestern University. Lee, immediate past president of the National Academy of Education, is best known in academia for her five decades of work helping students from minority backgrounds excel in an environment of low expectations, poverty, negative stereotypes, and other barriers. She was among the early scholars to scaffold children’s everyday experiences as a resource for learning in school. Today her sophisticated ideas behind “cultural modeling” are a standard approach in the field. 

In 2021, Lee received the McGraw Prize in Education, the 2021 James Squire Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association, the premier acknowledgment of outstanding achievement and success in education research. 

She is a member of the National Academy of Education in the United States,  the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, a fellow of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy, a member of the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Lee received her doctorate from the University of Chicago.  She is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), AERA’s past representative to the World Educational Research Association, past vice-president of Division G (Social Contexts of Education) of the American Educational Research Association, past president of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy, and past co-chair of the Research Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Council of Teachers of English, Scholars of Color Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Educational Research Association, the Walder Award for Research Excellence at Northwestern University, the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois-Urbana, the President’s Pacesetters Award from the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, a Presidential Citation from the American Educational Research Association and an honorary doctorate from the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

She has led two international delegations in education on behalf of the People to People’s Ambassador Program to South Africa and the People’s Republic of China.  She is the author or co-editor of three books, the most recent Culture, Literacy and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind, four monographs, and has published over 108 journal articles and book or handbook chapters in the field of education.

Her research addresses cultural supports for learning that include a broad ecological focus, with attention to language and literacy and African-American youth.  Her 54-year career includes teaching English Language Arts at the high school and community college levels. She was also a primary grade teacher and university professor.

She founded three African-centered schools, including two charter schools under the umbrella of the Betty Shabazz International Charter Schools (est. 1998) where she serves as chair of the board of directors.  She is married to Dr. Haki R. Madhubuti, poet and publisher of Third World Press, and is the mother of three adult children and four grandchildren. Together they have six adult children and nine grandchildren.

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 Maya Cunningham, who teaches in the School of Performing Arts at American University in Washington, D.C. Along with scholarly articles, she is the author of the forthcoming book Jazz Malungaje: Understanding the Cultural Identity Implications in African American Jazz from the South African Jazz Tradition. She is also a trained and practicing jazz vocalist with extensive performance history. In this conversation, we discuss African American musical history, Black study and community work, and the place of ethnography and enthomusicology in the field 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 Britt Rusert, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and is Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. Rusert is the author of The Afric-American Picture Gallery: William J. Wilson’s Speculative Museum of Black Art (Duke, 2026) and Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU, 2017). With Whitney Battle-Baptiste, she is co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book. Another book-length project, The Care Underground: Mutual Aid in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, is forthcoming from Verso.

Rusert holds a PhD in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University and a BA in English from Allegheny College. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She was a 2024-25 NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a 2023-24 Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

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 Armond Towns, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Williams College. Along with numerous scholarly pieces, he is the author of On Black Media Philosophy (2022) and is currently at work on a new book that takes a Black Studies approach to questions of artificial intelligence and cognate emergent forms of computational work tentatively titled The Artificial Life of Intelligence: The Liberal Arts and AI. In this conversation, we discuss political history and theory, media studies and Black study, and the place of the Black radical tradition in the field 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 Aja Marie Lans, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Sh is an archaeologist of the African Diaspora who integrates Black feminism and Black study into bioarchaeological investigations. A major area of focus is the objectification of human remains contained within universities and museum collections. She argues for the repatriation of Black Ancestors who are “owned” by such institutions.

Dr. Lans serves as the site bioarchaeologist at the Harlem African Burial Ground (HABG), a project coordinated by the New York City Economic Development Council and the Harlem African Burial Ground Initiative. Originally established as a segregated cemetery when the Dutch colonized Manhattan, the HABG was in use for over two centuries. After the land was sold in the mid-1800s, the section of the cemetery reserved for people of African descent was developed multiple times, most recently as a bus depot for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Before arriving at Hopkins, Dr. Lans was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. There, she performed provenance research on Black Ancestors who are curated in Harvard’s Peabody Museum with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

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 Nicole Fleetwood, a writer, curator, and art critic who teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Along with numerous articles and critical pieces, she is the author of Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), curator of the traveling exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” the book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which won the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism, and most, recently, Between the River and Railroad Tracks, forthcoming in November 2026. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. In this conversation, we discuss writing about place, memoir and Black study, and the meaning of history and memory in Black life.

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 Bobby Smith, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Trained as a sociologist with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith’s research examines how Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food have shaped their lives and the world. He is the James Beard–nominated author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America. His other work has appeared in public and scholarly outlets including Time, The Conversation, Word In Black, and the Journal of Black Studies. 

Bobby Smith earned a Ph.D. in development sociology and an M.S. in applied and agricultural economics from Cornell University, and a B.S. (summa cum laude) in agriculture – agricultural economics from Prairie View A&M University. 

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 Natanya Duncan, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Queens College in New York City. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is author of the groundbreaking work An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss historical writing as Black study, the place of gender in African American and diasporic history, and the obligations and imperatives for Black Studies in the contemporary moment.

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 Logan Shanks, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Grounded in traditions of Black feminist theory and study, her work analyzes the afterlife of slavery in Black visual and sonic aesthetics in the South and how violence is made pleasurable in Black popular culture and performance in the Americas. In this conversation, we discuss diasporic sensibilities in study, popular culture as history and theory, and how vernacular life sits in the heart of the Black Studies tradition.