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 Ousmane Power-Greene, who teaches in the Department of History at Clark University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, he is the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (2014), the novel The Confessions of Matthew Strong (2022), and is currently completing a book-length study of Hubert Harrison, Black radical thought, and African American emigration movements. In this conversation, we discuss intellectual work and its impact on Black politics, the relationship between art and political life, and how creative work and historical writing intertwine in a Black Studies context.

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 Dylan Penningroth, who teaches in the Department of History at University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His newest book is entitled Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). It explores how ordinary Black people used and thought about law in their everyday lives, and how Black legal activity and Black legal thought helped shape American law and Black social movements from the 1830s to the 1970s. The book tries to recover a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle. Before the Movement was awarded eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more.

He has written on a wide range of themes, from the troubled history of race in contract law to the history of police power to the legacy of slavery in Ghana, to how Black churches used civil rights. My first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur 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 Jessica Millward, who teaches in the Departments of History and African American Studies at University of California, Irvine. Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, she is the author of Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (2015). In this conversation, we discuss race and gender, archival work, and the complex task of writing African American women’s history in a Black Studies context.

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 Karla FC Holloway, Professor Emeritus in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Duke University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles and edited collections, she is the author of a number of critical and literary pieces: The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (1987), New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Bi-Racial and Bi-Cultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (with Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, 1987), Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature (1991), Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (1996),  Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial (2002), Bookmarks: Reading in Black and White A Memoir (2006), Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (2011), Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2013), and the novels A Death in Harlem (2019) and Gone Missing in Harlem (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of African American literature in Black study, the complicated history of institutionalization of the field, and the importance of memoir and creative work in Black Studies.

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 Kevin Holt, who teaches in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University. His research blends historical study, cultural studies, and the place of hip hop in contemporary race, politics, and identity discourse. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of musicological research in Black Studies, the expansive meaning and significance of hip hop, and the place of local and regional histories in cultural studies.

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 Maurice J. Hobson, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Georgia State University.Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, he is the author of The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (2019) and co-author of With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity (2025). In this conversation, we discuss community and academic work, the history, politics, and culture of Black study, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape writing intellectual and popular history.

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 Michelle M. Wright, who teaches in the Department of English at Emory University where she is Emory University College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English. Along with numerous scholarly articles, she is co-editor with Maria Fernandez and Faith Wilding of Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (2003), co-editor with Antje Schuhmann of Blackness and Sexualities (2007), and the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004), Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015). With Jodi Byrd, she is also co-editor of the book series "Critical Insurgencies" from Northwestern University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of nation in theorizing and practicing Black Studies, the role of critical theoretical inquiry in Black study, and the expansiveness of the very idea of blackness.

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 Chrystel Oloukoï, who teaches in the Department of Geography at University of Washington and who will be a CIFAR Global Studies Scholar from 2026-2028. Their research focuses on cinema studies, urban politics and history, and the place of gender and sexuality in Black life across the diaspora. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies questions challenge languages of nation and state, the complicated stories of diaspora and Black identity, and the expansive politics of Black Studies sensibilities and critical frames.

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 Zana Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersections of visual culture, contemporary Black Art, media, and technology with an emphasis on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in how Black artists and cultural producers use visual technologies in their image-making practices to shape political consciousness and cultural memory, document, and reimagine Black social life. In this conversation, we explore the link between histories of struggle and Black Studies practice, the encoding of blackness in popular and visual culture, and the past and future of community work as constitutive of the field.

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 writer and critic Dionne Ford. In addition to a number of pieces in popular and writerly venues, she is co-editor with Jill Strauss of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the role of study in creative writing, the place of memoir and storytelling in the study of Black life, and the intimacy and social significance of Black writing.