This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Theodore Foster III, who teaches in the Department of History, Geography, and Philosophy at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His research works at the intersection of history and political memory, with special attention to how we remember and reactivate the civil rights movement and other Black freedom struggles. In this conversation, we discuss the place of historical work for political mobilization, the complexity of blackness as an identity in the Black Studies tradition, and the importance of creating spaces of Black memory and of Black study.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 M. Shadee Malaklou, who is Chair of and teaches in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Berea College where she is also Inaugural Founder and Director of The bell hooks Center. Her work focuses on variations on afropessimism, from the expansiveness of its vision to important critical interventions against its nihilism. In this conversation, we discuss the cultural and political meaning of pessimism, the foundations of the field of Black Studies in nihilism and resistance to it, and the transformative role of gender and sexuality studies for the field.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 discussion is with Ula Taylor, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals she is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author with J. Tarika Lewis of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities. In this conversation, we discuss the history and politics of Black Studies, the expansive significance of the field, and the meaning of generational shifts for the practice of Black study.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Matthew Simmons, who teaches in the Program in African American Studies at University of Alabama, Birmingham. His work focuses on Black voting behavior, with particular attention to non-voting individuals and communities and what non-voting says about the politics of Black life. In this conversation, we discuss the relation of culture and politics in the Black Studies tradition, activism and pedagogy, and new horizons opened in the field around questions of gender and sexuality.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 discussion is with Blair LM Kelley, who is Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the director of the Center for the Study of the American South. In addition to a number of public facing and scholarly essays, she is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class. In this conversation, we explore the relationship between personal archives and historical writing, family stories and Black study, and the new horizons of historically-grounded research in the field of Black Studies.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 discussion is with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a scholar and poet living and working in Durham, North Carolina. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular pieces, she is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, Dub: Finding Ceremony, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, and most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Across this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies for Black feminist thinking, the relation of writing and expressive life to healing, and the place of history and memory for healing in times of political and cultural crisis.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Kelli Morgan, who is Founding Executive Director of the Black Artists Archive in Detroit, Michigan. She earned her doctorate in Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and has worked as a curator and activist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and now directs the Black Artists Archive. In this conversation, we discuss the place of art and curatorial practice in Black Studies, the role of art in building community knowledge, and the significance of curation and aesthetic work for Black liberation struggle.