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.

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 Brenda E. Stevenson, Professor of African American Studies and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of a number of important scholarly articles and has written and edited several important books: Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1997), The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots, (2013) What is Slavery? (2015), What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?: A History of the Enslaved Black Family (2023), and was the critical editor of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, published in 1989. In this conversation, we discuss her place in the field of Black Studies, how historical research enhances the study of Black life, and how Black Studies methodologies and sensibilities impact the study and writing of history.

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 J. Kameron Carter, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine. He has written numerous scholarly articles in race and religion and is the author of two books: Race: A Theological Account from 2008 and The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song from 2023. With Sarah Jane Cervenak, he is the co-editor of the series “Black Outdoors” on Duke University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of religion and religious studies in the Black Studies tradition, how Black study treats community and ordinary life as sites of knowing and being, and how a commitment to the everyday opens up new horizons for 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 conversation is with David Kalonji Walton, who teaches in the Departments of History and African American Studies at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is the author of a number of popular and scholarly pieces on African American history and politics and is a regular contributor to media outlets on issues concerning the past, present, and future of Black people. In this conversation, we discuss the details of what makes Black Studies a unique form of inquiry, the relationship of historical materials and theory while teaching in the field, and the extensive presence of Black Studies content in popular and intellectual culture.

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 Austin Lee, a postdoctoral scholar at the Boston University Society of Fellows specializing in the study of extended kin networks, communal mothering practices, and the nuances of Black families, sexuality, and gender. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has received support from various organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration. Her overarching research agenda utilizes qualitative research methods to highlight the interdependent relationship between antiblackness and norms related to sexuality and gender, such as the essentiality of the nuclear family structure, gender conformity, and compulsory heterosexuality. In this conversation, we explore the place of gender and sexuality in Black Studies, how research draws on and returns to Black communities, and how mixed-methods research charts new paths in the field.

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 Courtney Joseph, who teaches in the departments of History and African American Studies at Lake Forest College. In addition to a number of reviews and scholarly essays, she is completing a book on the Haitian diaspora in Chicago, Illinois entitled Invisibly Visible: A Community History of Haitians in Chicago. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between scholarly research and political communities, the place of historical methods in Black Studies, and how the study of Haiti and the diaspora speaks to the future of the field.