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 Wendell Marsh, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. His research explores the relationship between Islamic textual and cultural practice in West Africa and formations of intellectual traditions, social life, and the state. He is the author of Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (2025). He will be taking a new position at Muhammad VI Polytechnic University in Morocco in fall of 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of textual study in Black study, the place of religion and nation in Black Atlantic comparative work, and the place of religious diversity in the field of Black Studies.