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 Leigh Raiford, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to a number of critical essays in edited collections and journals, she is co-editor of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017) and the author of both Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013) and When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the political and cultural origins of the field, the place of art in the history of Black study, and the analytical and imaginative dimensions 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 Mark Campbell, who teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at University of Toronto, Scarborough. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations, hip-hop archives and notions of the human. Dr. Campbell is currently the Principal Investigator in the SSHRC funded research project, Black  Sonic Knowledges: Amplifying Black Canadian Musical Legacies and founder at Northside Hip-Hop Archive. He leads The Afrosonic Innovation Lab, a team of artists, creatives, and scholars actively engaged in sound experimentation, music-making and musicological analysis across the African diaspora. His recent books include the monograph AfroSonic Life (2022), the co-edited collection of essays, We Still Here: Hip Hop in North of the 49th Parallel published (in 2020) and the co-edited collection Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production with Murray Forman (in 2023).

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 Nicosia Shakes, who teaches in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Merced. In addition to essays in edited collections and journals such as Cultural Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Black Scholar, the CLR James Journal, SX Salon, she is the author of Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space (2023), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as an activist discipline, the importance of transnational, comparative work, and the demands of multidisciplinary research and study.

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 Nadia Alahmed, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Dickinson College.Her research centers on the historical, political and cultural connections between Middle East and Black America. Her book Black Intifada: a Century of Black and Palestinian Solidarity is forthcoming in 2027 and she is at work on a second book tentatively titled Afro-Arabs and the Changing Discourse on Race and Ethnicity in Middle East and North Africa, which explores ethno-racial formations in the region. In this conversation, we discuss political and cultural history, the possibilities of Black-Arab solidarity, and the meaning of scholarship and activist practice 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 A.D. Carson, who teachings in the Department of Music at University of Virginia. His work as a rapper, educator, writer, and commentator deals with race, place, history, literature, hip hop, rhetorics & performance. His books include Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, COLD, and The City. His mixtape, i used to love to dream, was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. It received a Prose Award (Best eProduct) from the Association of American Publishers and was a finalist for the Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award from the American Council of Learned Societies.

His work has been published by The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, SPIN, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, NPR’s Code Switch, Bleacher Report, and Scalawag and has been featured by Complex, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, NPR’s All Things Considered, OkayPlayer, Time, USA Today, and XXL. His recent audio projects, including Owning My Masters (Mastered) and V: ILLICIT, are available to stream/download free from aydeethegreat.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 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.