The Black Studies Podcast

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 Mabel Wilson, who teaches in the Departments of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio&, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal, and desire. She was a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (2020) at the University of Virginia.  For the Museum of Modern Art, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). Wilson has published Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012). She is currently developing the manuscript for her third book Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and American Civic Architecture.

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 Brandon Byrd, who teaches in the Departments of History and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a historian of Black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on the United States and Haiti. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti and the co-editor of two books, Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History and Haiti for the Haitians.

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 James Smethurst, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Along with many essays on African American music, history, and culture, he is the author of Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (2003), The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011), Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity (2020) and co-editor with Chris Green and Rachel Rubin of Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (2006) and co-editor with John Bracey and Sonia Sanchez of SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014). In this conversation, we discuss the politics of African American history, cultural studies, and the place of music in Black Studies methodology and in the work of Black study.

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 Marcia Chatelain, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  Previously, she was a Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and a Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. 

She is a proud native of Chicago, Illinois, and I'm an even prouder graduate of the following schools: St. Ignatius College Prep, the University of Missouri-Columbia (B.A. Journalism/Religious Studies), and Brown University (A.M. and Ph.D., American Civilization). She has been honored to be named a Harry S. Truman Scholar (2000), Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life Amethyst Award recipient (2009), German Marshall Fund of the U.S. American Fellow (2011), Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow (2012), French American Foundation Young Leader (2015),  and National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow (2017-2018).  Her teaching has been recognized with Georgetown University's  Dorothy M. Brown Teaching Award (2014), the Edward Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence (2015), and the College Academic Council's Faculty Award (2016).  In 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education named me a Top Influencer in Higher Education in recognition of my curation of #FergusonSyllabus, a response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.  She is a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. 

Her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won several awards including a 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2019-2021 Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award from Harvard’s Business History Review, the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History, the 2021 Organization of American Historians Lawrence W. Levine Award, the  2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, and the 2020 Hooks National Book Award.

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 Yvonne Chireau, Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies and Professor Emeritus of Religion at Swarthmore College.  She is the author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003) and the co-editor of Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism (1999). Her current book project is called Graphic Voodoo: Black Religion in the Comic Book Imaginary. Dr. Chireau lives in Delaware County, Pennsylvania with her beloved family and a three-legged cat. Her writings on the intersections of magic, Africana religions, and popular culture tropes of Voodoo can be found online at The Academic Hoodoo (academichoodoo.com). 

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 Régine Jean-Charles, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Along with many essays on Black feminism, Haiti, and Caribbean literature, she is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014), Martin Luther King and the Trumpet of Conscience Today (2021), Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022). In this conversation, we discuss Caribbean literary studies, the experience and history of Haiti in a Black Studies frame, and the place of teaching and community work in our commitments to 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 Paula C. Austin, who teaches in the Department of African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. She is a U.S. historian with a focus on African American history, the history of race and racism, visual culture, urban and women’s history, history of social science, and the history of childhood. She is particularly interested in interiority and broadening the narrow definitions of intellectual history. Her book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press) is a social and intellectual history of poor and working class young black people in early twentieth century, racially segregated Washington, D.C. 

As an undergraduate, she was trained as a creative writer and developed her teaching pedagogy in adult basic education classrooms in New York City. In 2016, she was the co-editor of Radical Teacher (Vol 106), special issue on “Teaching #BlackLivesMatter,” and is the author of “‘Conscious Self-Realization and Self-Direction’: New Negro Ideologies and the Confines of Visual Representation,” in Journal of African American History (Summer 2018). She has an article in Gender, Women, and Families of Color, and was a contributing author to Colonize This! Young women of color on today’s feminism, eds. Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman, (Seal Press, 2002, 2019). She was also the CUNY Graduate Center inaugural archival fellow at NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a Jackie McLean Fellow at the University of Hartford. She has served as diversity faculty fellow for professional development at the Center for Teaching and Learning and with the Division of Inclusive Excellence at California State University, Sacramento.

Paula Austin shared some of her most recent research on the Black youths of Jim Crow-era Washington, DC, in a video for CAS’s new series, The Journey: How New Ideas Are Born.

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 Ra Malika Imhotep, who is assistant professor of Global African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College. The central focus of their research is an application of Black feminist political economy to literal and figurative representations of transgressive Black femininities in folk cultures, aesthetic traditions, and resistance histories throughout the Global Black South. To that end, their forthcoming academic monograph explores these themes through the folkloric figure of the “tar baby.” They are also the author of the poetry collection gossypiin (2022), a co-convenor of The Church of Black feminist Thought ,and a member of The Black Aesthetic curatorial collective. Their writing has been featured in The Guggenheim Museum, The Academy of American Poets, Women & Performance, The Drama Review, Palimpsest, and several anthologies.  In this conversation, we discuss the complexity of intellectual work and cultural life, gender and blackness in a diasporic gram, and the place of creative 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 Ezinwanne ‘Ezi’ Odozor, Nigerian Canadian writer, higher education professional, and anti-racist practitioner, Njoki Wane, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto, and Janelle Brady, assistant professor in the School of Early Childhood studies at Toronto Metropolitan 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 Alix Chapman, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. His research and teaching interests include Black Queer Studies, Black Feminism, and anthropology and is the author of Raising the Bottom: Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between activism and intellectual life, sexuality and blackness, and the place of ethnographic methods in Black Studies.