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 Vanessa K. Valdés, a writer and scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, performances, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. She served as a professor at The City College for New York for 14 years, from 2007-2021, earning the rank of full professor, before being named the Dean of the Macaulay Honors College (2021-2022), then returning to City College as the Associate Provost for Community Engagement. Beginning in 2025, she was named the Editor of CENTRO Press, the book-making arm of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. She is the author of Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017), namesake of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. She is the editor of Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012); The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012); Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020); and, with Earl Fitz, Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas (2024). From 2021-2023, along with David Pullins, she co-curated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and co-authored its exhibition catalogue, published in 2023.

With Diasporic Blackness, she began a long-standing relationship with the Schomburg Center; she currently serves on its Centennial Advisory Board, and is co-editor, with Barrye Brown and Laura Helton, of a new book, Black Studies on 135th Street: The Founding and Future of the Schomburg Collection, coming in April 2026. In addition to her role at CENTRO Press, she is on the advisory board of Callaloo and Small Axe, and is the series editor of the Afro-Latinx Futures series at the State University of New York Press and a series co-editor, along with Nathan Dize and Annette Joseph-Gabriel, of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press. You can learn more about her by visiting her website https://drvkv23.com/ or following her on Instagram - @drvkv23.