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 Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles and edited collections, he is the author of What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2001), Songs in the Key of Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013), Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (2022), and the groundbreaking work The New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity, published in 2005 and reissued as a second edition in 2015. He is also the host of the long-running series Left of Black, a series of discussions of popular culture and scholarly treatments of Black life. In this conversation, we discuss his entry into Black Studies, the place of popular cultural study in the field’s past and future, and the complex relationship between scholarly work and the everyday lives of Black people.

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 conversation is with Professor Nathaniel Norment, Professor of English at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia where he also directs the Black Ink Project. He is well-known for his innovations in the field of Black Studies as a writer and cultural historian, and in addition to a number of scholarly articles he is the author-editor of a number of key books including Readings in African American Language, The African American Studies Reader, The Addison Gayle, Jr. Reader, and African American Studies: The Discipline and its Dimensions. In this conversation, he reflects on his journey into the study of Black life, the history of the field, and the place of critical expressive writing in the development of Black Studies thought, reflection, and its intellectual contributions.

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 Wendyliz Martinez, a 2024 ACLS Leading Edge fellow where she works with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice developing a digital humanities project related to the history of slavery within the state of New Jersey. She earned her doctorate in English and African American Studies at Penn State University and is a City College of New York and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow alumna. She is currently writing about Black girlhood and its depictions in social media, film, and literature, and maintains interest in art practices from Black communities and its impact on our understanding of Blackness as well as its role in preserving histories.