Today's conversation is with Robert P. Robinson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Gender Studies at John Jay College and Doctoral Faculty in Urban Education, Africana Studies, and Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Prior to higher education, he was a K-12 educator and mentor for 11 years. His broad research and teaching focus on the Black Freedom Movement, Black education history, Blackqueer studies, digital humanities, history of education, and curriculum studies. Robinson’s work can be found in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal for Multicultural Education, and The Killens Review of Arts & Letters, and more. Robinson is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow for his forthcoming book, Education for the Revolution: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, which will be published in January 2027 through NYU Press’s Black Power Series.

Today’s conversation is with Melanie Holmes, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the meaning and significance of Black Power across geographies, in particular in the political and cultural space of the United States and Barbados. Her work on these issues can be found in a cluster of publications, including “Beautifully Black!: How Negro History Week and the Black History Movement Influenced Education in and Beyond the Black Power Era,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of African American History. In this conversation, we explore the complex history of resistance to antiblack racism, the relationship between Black study and education, and how historical research both grounds and expands the Black Studies imagination.

Today’s conversation is with Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, who teaches in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. She has published extensively in popular and scholarly venues and is the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020) and of the forthcoming The Survival of a People. In this conversation, we discuss the complex geographies of blackness in the Atlantic world, archival work and its relation to Black study, and the expansive historical, literary, and theoretical horizons of Black Studies.

Today's conversation is with Desiree Cooper, a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, former attorney, and editor of the groundbreaking 2026 anthology, Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors. Her work, which often explores the intersection between gender and race, has appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash Fiction America 2023, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and noted in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection, Know the Mother. Her children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and one of the New York Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.”  

Today’s conversation is with Michelle B. Taylor, an educator, author, and advocate who writes under the name Feminista Jones. She has published widely in popular and scholarly venues, has spoken in academic and community spaces across the country, and earned a doctorate in Africology and African American Studies from Temple University where she teaches courses on gender, race, and media. Her books include Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets (2019), The Secret of Sugar Water (2017), and Push The Button (2014). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of Africological approaches to Black study, the relationship between scholarly inquiry and community activism, and the place of popular and scholarly writing in Black Studies.

Today’s conversation is with Joanna Cardenas, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the nexus of critical carceral studies, disability studies, and Black feminist thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, gender, and space. Through a close spatial analysis of California prisons, her research focuses on how systems of confinement inform  understandings of gender, race, and ableism. She also studies how the carceral state of South Central Los Angeles impacts Black and Latinx women, with a focus on surveillance and other policing practices. With a deep engagement in community-based research, she also helps interrogate the experimentation of new surveillance and policing technologies in Skid Row, the Figueroa corridor, and Los Angeles more broadly. Joanna’s research has been supported by the Greater Good Science Center, the Black Studies Collaboratory, the Center for Race and Gender, Berkeley Law, and Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program. Beyond academia, Joanna is also actively involved in litigation challenging staff misconduct across California state prisons. In this conversation, we discuss the place of carceral studies in the study of Black life, how urban studies and questions of gender impact Black Studies inquiry, and how community work expands the classroom and intellectual life.

Today's conversation is with Justin Leroy, who teaches in the Department of History at Duke University. He specializes in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular interests in intellectual history, slavery, abolition, and the history of capitalism. His first book, The Lowest Freedom, recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that located the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. His current research focuses on carceral studies, and he is working on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. He also has longstanding interests in comparative Black/Indigenous and Black/Asian American histories.

Today's conversation is with Kaiama L. Glover, professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life" (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton) and a series of essays, “‘Blackness’ in French.” Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction. She is also the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. Professor Glover's scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Today’s conversation is with Imani Perry, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. She has published extensively in popular and scholarly venues and is the author of eight books: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004) More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018), Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018), Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019), South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022), and Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). Perry was named MacArthur Fellow in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the contours of Black study, the expansiveness of the Black Studies imagination, and the place of gender and cultural studies in the field.

Today's conversation is with Kinitra Brooks, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture as seen in her weekly column for The Root, “The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country” and her multiple visits as a commentator on NPR’s 1A.  She has co-edited The Lemonade Reader (Routledge 2019), an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade. She has recently co-edited The Renaissance Reader (Routledge 2025), which is also based on a Beyoncé project. Her two other books are Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women.

Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman throughout history and in contemporary popular culture as seen in her forthcoming graphic novel, Red Dirt Witch (Abrams Books 2026). Dr. Brooks recently served as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University during the 2018-2019 academic year. Dr. Brooks also served as the Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School for the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Brooks’ current book project, Divine Conjurers: Rootwork, Resistance, and Revolution explores the unique relationship between Black women’s political subversion and Black women’s spirit work.

Today’s conversation is with andré carrington, who teaches in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. He has published extensively on literature and the speculative arts and is the author of two books, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016) and Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (2026), as well as editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of the Black Studies imagination, the place of popular and graphic arts in Black study, and the terms of thinking and teaching Black life in times of political crisis.

Today’s conversation is with Kyra Gaunt, who teaches in the Department of Music and Theater at State University of New York, Albany. She has published extensively on race and gender in both academic and popular venues, and is the author of the groundbreaking work The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop (2007). In this conversation, we explore the significance of musical study in the field of Black Studies, the relationship between vernacular cultural practices and world- and idea-making, and how a focus on the experiences of Black girls and women shifts our understanding of the meaning of Black study.

Today’s conversation is with LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, who teaches in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she also serves as Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. Her work is invested in history, spirituality, and memory, with a particular focus on African American women and religion. To that end, she is the author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (2014) and has edited two books, Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, with Carol B. Duncan and Tamura A. Lomax (2014) and Fat Religion: Protestant Christianity and the Construction of the Fat Body, with Lynne Gerber and Susan Hill (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of historical and religious study in Black Studies, spiritual practice as Black study, and how questions of gender and region transform our approach to the field.

Today's conversation is with Crystal N. Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History and affiliated faculty in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where she also serves as the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College. A native of North Carolina, she is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, U.S. women’s history, and the American South. Her scholarship examines racial and sexual violence, bridging social and political history to illuminate long-obscured dimensions of the American past. Attentive to absences and asymmetries in the archive, she draws on gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to interpret some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.

Professor Feimster earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press), recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and honorable mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize. Her award-winning scholarship also includes the article “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” which received the Kentucky Historical Society’s Collins Award for best article in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” which received honorable mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She has published widely in leading journals and has written essays for broader audiences in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. She is currently completing two books, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.

Her professional appointments reflect her leadership in the field. She is President of the Southern Association of Women’s Historians, a member of the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, Associate Editor of Civil War History, and Contributing Editor to Labor. She previously served as Co-President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and has held numerous leadership roles in national scholarly organizations. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and other distinguished institutions. A devoted and award-winning teacher, Professor Feimster offers well-subscribed courses on the Long Civil Rights Movement, African American Women’s History, Critical Race Theory, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In recognition of her commitment to undergraduate and graduate mentorship, she has received multiple honors, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Yale Provost Teaching Prize, the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize, the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring, and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities.

Today’s conversation is with Maya Doig-Acuña, doctoral candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her work is invested in history and memory studies, with a particular focus on Afro-Latinx culture and identity that emphasizes diasporic movement and structures of kinship. To that end, she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation under the title We are Her Beloved Descendants: Alternate Archives of Afro-Panamanian Memory, Diaspora, and Kinship. In this conversation, we discuss the expansive reach of Black Studies, how Black study informs multidisciplinary approaches to the past, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape critical discourse around memory studies and historical research.

Today’s conversation is with Dr. Willie Jamaal Wright who is a Research Fellow within the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include the study of urban and black geographies throughout the Black Diaspora. His writing has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the Black Scholar, City & Society and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Urban Studies Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. He is currently co-editing the late geographer, Bobby M. Wilson’s Consumer Political Economy and African America for the University of Georgia Press. Lastly, Dr. Wright is working on his first sole-authored text, Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in the Houston's Third Ward. In this conversation, we discuss black geographies as emerging field in black studies, black studies as life studies, as well as a place of refuge for black students.

Today’s conversation is with Mark Sanders, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and English at University of Notre Dame. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles on African American and Afro-Caribbean literature and culture, as well as author, editor, and translator of three books, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown (1999), Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell from 2007) and A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence (2010). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational study, language diversity in the Black Americas, and the fecundity of Black Studies critical frames for the study of literature and culture.

Today's conversation is with Jocelyn Brown, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Ohio University with training in gerontology, applied sociology, and applied psychology. Originally from West Virginia, her scholarship centers Black Appalachian life across the life course. She has a particular focus on health disparities, structural racism, and the political-economic conditions shaping Black communities in Appalachia, the wider U.S., and the African diaspora.

Today's conversation is with Drew D. Brown, Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Florida, specializing in the intersections of Black Culture and Sports. His current book manuscript explores “Baller Culture,” the hip-hop-informed Black cultural expression found in sports. Analyzing sports media from 1988 to 2008, he argues that film, magazines, and commercials became a public arena where young Black Americans negotiated their cultural expression to shape and reshape identities, build community, and gain popularity. The book shows how they deployed a hybrid identity, which was often commodified and misrepresented by the media. Ultimately, the book highlights the constantly evolving nature of Black cultural identity.

Today’s conversation is with Nneka Dennie, who teaches in the Department of History at Washington and Lee University. She has published on early African-American thought and history, with particular attention to the work of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and is the author and editor of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (2023) and the in-progress book Redefining Radicalism: Black Women Intellectuals in the Nineteenth Century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of historical and cultural research in the field of Black Studies, the place of gender in work on the African American intellectual tradition, and the urgency of the study of Black radical thought in our contemporary moment.

Today’s conversation is with Andrea Mays, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of New Mexico. She has written extensively in public facing venues and has authored scholarly essays that draw on the history of Black art and what it has to say about resistance, refusal, and culture making in an antiblack world. Her work focuses on African American Visual Culture and Black Atlantic Culture and Politics, Afrofuturism, and Black Feminist Studies. Her research interests include Black Atlantic expressions of critical and resistance politics. Mays’ forthcoming essay “Legacies of Wisdom: The Praxis of Teaching Butler’s Visions of Apocalypse During Apocalyptic Times” will be included in a collection titled, Authority in the Speculative Fiction Classroom due out in 2026. Mays’ public scholarship includes essays and articles published in USA Today, The Albuquerque Journal, The Santa Fe Reporter, IKON Feminisms Digital Archive, and the Morgan State University Global Journalism Review. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of art and culture, new horizons of documenting everyday Black life, and the task of cultivating and sustaining the legacy of Black Studies in a politically fraught world.

Today’s conversation is with Tikia Hamilton, who teaches in the Department of History at Loyola University of Chicago. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of Nothing Less Than Equality: The Battle Over Segregated Education in the Nation's Capital, published in March 2026. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of writing the history of Black life, the centrality of questions of education in Black study, and how Black Studies informs her research questions, sources, and approach to writing.

Today’s conversation is with Sam Tecle, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research engages with Black and diaspora studies, Urban studies, and sociology of education with particular focus on the analysis of diverse experiences, trajectories and expressions of Blackness grounded in particular histories of racialization, colonialism, community formation and resistance. In this conversation, we discuss the early formative history of Black Studies in Canada, the roots of Black study epistemologies in everyday practice, and the complexity of diverse stories of blackness for the Black Studies imagination.

In today’s conversation, we explore John Drabinski’s three latest monographs. In Atlantic Theory, he traces the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism while offering a comparative account of critical thought across the Atlantic world. In So Unimaginable a Price, he turns to James Baldwin, situating his work within a broader mid-century Atlantic context and placing it in dialogue with thinkers across the Caribbean and Africa.
Finally, in At the Margins of Nihilism, he develops a theoretical framework through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson, drawing on figures such as Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Baldwin to examine how different forms of nihilism operate as closed systems, and how they are unsettled through vernacular practices of life and refusal.

Today's conversation is with Bryce Henson, a critical interpretive social scientist who specializes in Black diasporic cultural studies. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism with affiliations in Africana Studies and the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University. In 2016, he received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research with a Latin American & Caribbean Studies graduate minor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil examines how the Black hip-hop community in Salvador da Bahia constructs the quilombo (maroon) in urban contexts as a mode of fostering and protecting Black life. The book earned three awards from the National Communication Association and honorable mention for Best Book Prize from the Brazilian Studies Association. He is also a co-editor of the 2020 volume, Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization. Previously, he was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He now serves on the advisory board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).

Today’s conversation is with RA Judy, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a number of important articles on aesthetics, language, and knowledge production in the broad Black intellectual tradition as well as two books, (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992) and Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (2020). In this conversation, we explore the place of diverse languages in Black Studies research, Black study as geographically adventurous, and the importance of thinking and practicing community work inside critical theoretical study.

Today's conversation is with Justene Hill Edwards, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (Norton, 2024) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021).  A specialist in African American history, her research examines Black economic life in America.  She has been awarded several fellowships and awards, most recently the 2025 Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction and the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.  She is a series editor for the History of U.S. Capitalism Series at Columbia University Press.  

Today’s conversation is with Tyler D. Parry, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Disapora Studies at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of a number of scholarly and public-facing essays, and has published Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (2020) and, with Robert Greene II, Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (2021). In this conversation, we explore the importance of regional attentiveness in writing Black history in the United States, thinking blackness in the southwest, and the expansiveness of the Black Studies archive and imagination.

Today's conversation is with Kathryn Sophia Belle, philosopher, published author, and public speaker.  After earning her doctorate in philosophy, she had a successful 20-year career in academia (2003-2023) before resigning/retiring as a tenured associate professor (of philosophy, Black Studies, and Women's Studies) and administrator (directing an Africana Research Center).  Her scholarly specializations include African American/Africana Philosophy, Black Feminist Philosophy, Continental Philosophy/Existentialism, and Social/Political Philosophy. She is author of Beauvoir and Belle: A Black Feminist Critique of The Second Sex (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014, also in French: Éditions Kimé, 2023). She is also co-editor of Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010).  Her current writing projects include a book on the philosophy of Audre Lorde (under contract with Yale University Press) and her own memoir trilogy (Marriage/Motherhood/Erotic Empowerment).  Dr. Belle is founder of La Belle Vie Academy with signature programs: La Belle Vie Writers and Exit Strategies, Happily Unmarried and Erotic Empowerment.  Dr. Belle is now channeling her 20-years of experience and expertise in academia and La Belle Vie Academy with a new venture: Belle's Bed & Breakfast/Boutique Hotel - a continuation and extension of her overall vision.  She is delighted to call Savannah, GA her chosen and spiritual home – ever grateful to be in beloved community.

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.

Today’s conversation is with Bianca Beauchemin, who teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her work seeks to disrupt the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, exploring how embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance, and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. In this conversation, we explore the particularities of Black Studies in a Canadian context, the place of gender and sexuality studies in work of Black study, and the complexity of thinking Canadian blackness.

Today's conversation is with Marlee S. Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and author whose work centers oral histories of Black educators, African American educational history, and culturally responsive teaching and leadership. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Bunch has over a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary contexts and has held leadership roles in curriculum development, educator preparation, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she also created two state-approved micro-credentials—one based on The Magnitude of Us and the other on Unlearning the Hush, designed to support educators’ culturally responsive practice through sustained, reflective learning.

Dr. Bunch is the author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press), which received the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research, Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge). 

Today’s conversation is with Ashon Crawley, who teaches in the Departments of Religious Studies and of African American Studies at University of Virginia. Along with his numerous scholarly essays and books Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016) and The Lonely Letters (2020), he is a widely exhibited and hosted multimedia artist. In this conversation, we explore the aesthetic and epistemological resonance of religious practice in Black study, the pleasures of adventurous multidisciplinary research, and the open horizons of pedagogical practice in the Black Studies tradition.

Today’s conversation is with Tashal Brown, assistant professor of Urban Education and Secondary Social Studies in the College of Education at University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender in relation to equity and justice in educational contexts and how the cultivation and enactment of critical literacies and liberatory pedagogies across K–12 schools, community-based spaces, and teacher education shape the perspectives, experiences, and actions of youth and educators. In this conversation, we explore the centrality of the study of childhood in Black Studies, the place of education in the field, and the transformative power of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Black girlhood.

Today's conversation is with Hanna Garth, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, and was previously Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. She held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA, an MPH in Global Health from Boston University, and a BA from Rice University. She is a food anthropologist, broadly focused on how individuals and families navigate food systems in the service of their desires to eat in particular, culturally inflected ways. With critical attention to the granular, everyday experiences of navigating broader systems, her work links macro-scale structures to social and material impacts on life conditions. Her research asks questions like beyond our basic needs for survival, what does it take to live a decent life, and who gets to decide? Her work critically analyzes concepts like justice, interrogating how justice is understood and by whom it is defined? She interrogates concepts like food sovereignty and its possibilities in our contemporary globalized world. She is interested in how people build and maintain community and support networks within broader contexts of inequality and struggles for survival. She studies these issues in Latin America and the Caribbean and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. | 

Today’s conversation is with Kimberly Blockett, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Delaware. Along with a number of scholarly articles in prominent journals, she has compiled the heavily annotated edition Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experiences, Ministerial Travels, and Labour’s of Mrs. Elaw (2021), edited the collection Mapping Black Women’s Geographies (2025), and the author of Race, Religion, and Rebellion: The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw (fall 2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of recovering lost voices in a multidisciplinary approach to history, the place of religion in Black study, and the exciting, productive, and imaginative messiness of Black Studies research.

Today’s conversation is with Antoine Williams, a multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of drawing in the expanded field in the School of Art and Art History at University of Florida. His work has been exhibited across the United States and he’s held numerous fellowships and residencies in the arts.His interactive, multimedia, site-specific installation with Josiah Golson titled “Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right” is being exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art through early-July 2026. In this conversation, we discuss roots of his concern with Black life, the relationship between study and creative production, and the place of the arts in the Black Studies project.

Today's conversation is with Angela Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard-Columbia. She studies the political economy of suburban Black middle-class suburbs, and her forthcoming book Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage, February 2026) asks why majority-Black suburbs that work hard to build stable, thriving communities still face financial barriers that make this harder than it is for their white counterparts.

Today's conversation is with Robert Bland, who teaches in the Departments of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. My research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory.

His latest book - Requieum for Reconstruction Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation - examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. It explores the efforts of black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed Compromise of 1877. In doing so, he illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, local schools, and representations of Gullah folklore and the simultaneous debate in the national black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order.

Today’s conversation is with Kimberly Thomas McNair, who teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She teaches widely in literature, gender studies, and cultural studies inside the Black Studies tradition and is completing a book manuscript entitled Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: T-Shirt Culture and the Black Activist Tradition.In this conversation, we discuss the unique character of Black Studies, relations of disciplines to the non-disciplinary character of the field, and the intersection of politics, memory, and cultural studies in the history of Black social activism.

Today's conversation is with Dr. Ronald Zeigler, former director of Nyumburu Cultural Center for 25 years; colleague who worked as adjuncted in the African American and Africana Studies Department integral part of the Black community on campus for 47 years.

Today's conversation is with Deborah Gray White, an emeritus Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is author of Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994; several K-12 textbooks on United States History, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860.  In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of black women into the modern historical profession and the development of the field of black women’s history. Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored college text, is in its third edition.

As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C, and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on  Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March.  She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history, and in 2019 was awarded the Stephen A. Ambrose Oral History Award. From 2016-2021 she co-directed the “Scarlet and Black Project” which investigated Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University and is co-editor of the three-part Scarlet and Black series that explores this history. In 2024, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History awarded her its Living Legacy Award for her work in establishing the field of African American women’s history. She is currently at work on an autobiography, tentatively titled “Winning Against Ugly: A Black Historian’s Tale of Love, Loss, and the Historical Profession.”

Today’s conversation is with Paul C. Taylor, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on philosophy and the question of race, he is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2003), On Obama (2015), and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is currently at work on two book-length projects: Dark Futures and Uneasy Sanctuary: Rethinking Race-Thinking.In this conversation, we discuss the place of philosophical thinking in the study of Black life, critical theory as a form of Black study, and the intersection of aesthetic questions and critical theories of race in the field of Black Studies.

Today’s conversation is with Joanna Davis-McElligatt, who teaches in the Department of English at University of North Texas. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on literature and graphic arts, she is the author of the forthcoming Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora (2026).In this conversation, we discuss the place of the Black literary tradition in the study of Black life, disciplinary limits and possibilities, and how comics, graphic arts, and aesthetic questions they raise expand the Black Studies imagination.

Today's conversation is with Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA.  His books include, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009) Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990, 2nd ed. 2015); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002, New Ed. 2020);  Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (Free Press 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); and forthcoming Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt, 2026).  He also co-edited (with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor), Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies (2023); (with Jesse Benjamin), Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World  (2018); (with Stephen Tuck) The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015);  (with Franklin Rosemont) Black, Brown, and Beige:  Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (2009); (with Earl Lewis) To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (2000); and (with Sidney J. Lemelle), Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1995).  Kelley’s articles and essays have appeared in dozens of several anthologies, journals, and magazines, including Hammer and Hope;  American Quarterly; African Studies Review;  Journal of American History; New Labor Forum; The Nation; New York Times; New York Review of Books;   Radical History Review; Transition; Black Scholar; Dissent; Rethinking Marxism; Black Music Research Journal; Callaloo; Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir; and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.

Today's conversation is with Clarissa Myrick-Harris White, PhD, who is a tenured full Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and History at Morehouse College. She leads the college's Movement, Memory, and Justice Project and was co-founder of the Morehouse Black Men's Research Institute. Previously she served as Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Associate Provost for Curricular and Pedagogical Initiatives and more recently Chair of the Humanities Division at Morehouse. Dr. Myrick-Harris White is currently Co-Editor-In-Chief of The Black Scholar Journal. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of race, class, culture, and gender in the quest for social change and justice, emphasizing leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. 

Today's conversation is with Nathan H. Dize, who teaches in the Department of French at Washington University in Saint Louis, and his work is situated at the intersection of French Caribbean literary and intellectual history, African Diaspora studies, translation studies. He is currently working on two projects: Attending to the Dead: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning (SUNY Press) and Handle with Care: The Legacies of African American Translators of Francophone Literature (LSU Press). Nathan is also a translator of Haitian literature, and his translations include the novels Duels by Néhémy Dahomey, The Immortals and The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot. He is also a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective, a member of the digital networks of Fanm Rebèl and Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History, and a founding editor of the digital history project, A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. He is a co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press.

Today’s conversation is with Robin Brooks, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Pittsburgh. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and journal publications, she is the author of Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (2022) and at work on a book project tentatively titled Death Proximity: Grief and Emotional Wellness Stories in Black Communities.In this conversation, we discuss the diasporic Black literary tradition, the expansiveness of the field, and the fecundity of mixed-methods research for the study of Black life. 

Today's conversation is with Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and others.

Today’s conversation is with Derek Handley, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Along with a number of articles on rhetoric, urban studies, and composition, he is the author of Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance during the Black Freedom Movement (2024).In this conversation, we discuss the the place of rhetorical work in the Black intellectual tradition, community work and politics, and the future of Black Studies as a multi-disciplinary project. 

Today’s conversation is with Dr. Alisha Gaines who is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. She is the co-humanities director of the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School in Edgard, Louisana, and is currently writing her second manuscript “Children of the Plantionocene” which centers on Black American origin stories, Black craftscapes, and what we collectively inherit from the plantation. In this conversation, we discuss: black study as an integral component of an insurgent black radical tradition, the black south and the plantation as rich spaces of knowledge production, and the role of black studies in the fight against local, national, and global dimensions of anti-blackness and fascism today

Today's conversation with with Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Keel has received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. He is the author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science and co-editor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. His latest book is The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. 

Today's conversation is with Benjamin Talton, Executive Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. He is an historian who researches and writes about culture and politics in Africa and the African diaspora. He earned his BA in history at Howard University and his doctorate, also in history, at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Howard, Talton was Professor of History at Temple University. He has also taught African History at Hofstra University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. 

A highly respected author, Talton has published three books: The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave 2010); Black Subjects in Africa and its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (Palgrave 2011), which he co-edited with Dr. Quincy Mills of the University of Maryland; and, most recently, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Penn Press 2019), which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association. Among his current projects is co-editing Volume III of the Cambridge History of the African Diaspora, with Monique Bedasse and Nemata Blyden, and, chief-editor of all three of the series’ volumes, Michael Gomez. Talton’s work has also appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and popular media outlets, including The Washington Post, Jacobin, Current History, the Journal of Asian and African Studies, The African Studies Review, The Conversation, Ghana Studies, and Africa Is A Country. 

Talton serves on the editorial board of the American Historical Review, the leading History academic journal. He is a former editor of African Studies Review, the leading North American peer-reviewed African Studies journal, and serves on the advisory board for New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD). Dr. Talton is a past president of the Ghana Studies Association and a former member of the executive board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).

Today’s conversation is with Mali Collins, who teaches in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. Along with numerous scholarly and public pieces, she is the author of Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination (2024) and is a practicing birth, postpartum, and pregnancy termination doula, and a trained Perinatal and Infant Loss advocate with The Womb Room in Baltimore, MD. In this conversation, we discuss the intersection of race, gender, and questions of reproduction and its transformative effect for the study of Black life. 

Today’s conversation is with Theodore A. Harris, a Philadelphia-based artist and writer. Along with numerous exhibits of his multi-media artwork linked via his website, he is the author of Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism, and co-author of two books with Amiri Baraka Our Flesh of Flames (Anvil Arts Press) and Malcolm X as Ideology (LeBow Books), a book with Fred Moten: i ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books); and TRIPTYCH: Text by Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (Caza de Poesía).In this conversation, we discuss the history of Black expressive culture, the importance of art for understanding Black life, and the meaning of creativity in politically fraught times. 

Michael Simanga is an activist writer, multi-disciplinary artist and educator and came of age during the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement as a student organizer and poet in his hometown of Detroit. He was active in the Congress of African People, the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Assembly, the anti-apartheid movement, the labor movement and the independent schools movement. As a cultural worker he has focused on building and supporting community based cultural institutions and has spent his adult life as an advocate of art and culture as an instrument of social change and development. He is the former Executive Director of the National Black Arts Festival; former director of Fulton County Arts and Culture and the Southwest Arts Center. Professor Simanga earned an undergraduate degree in History from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and a Ph.D. in African American Studies from the Union Institute and University of Cincinnati.

Today’s conversation is with Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, who teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University, Newark. Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, Laylah is currently co-organizing To Collect and Collate: Keepers of Black Photography, a convening on Black photography archives to be held at NYU Accra in March 2026. Her exhibition, Ground of Memory is on view at Express Newark, Rutgers University - Newark until January 30, 2026 and she is working on a book of first person essays on Black photographers. In this conversation, we discuss curatorial work, photography, and the centrality of aesthetic questions in the Black Studies imagination and intellectual tradition.

Today's conversation is with Rahman A. Culver, an educator and activist who works to support measurable, lasting social change. Culver earned his B.A. in Afro-American Studies from University of Maryland in 2001, working to found and serving as director of the Saturday Freedom School program. He is certified in secondary and special education, holding a Master's degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. Culver has worked as an educator in the Montgomery County and Prince George's County public school systems.

Today's conversation is with Marion Orr, the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He previously was a member of the political science faculty at Duke University. Professor Orr earned his B.A. degree in political science from Savannah State College, M.A. in political science from Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University), and a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park. From 2008-2014, Professor Orr served as Director of the Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. He is a former chair of Brown's Department of Political Science and a former director of Brown's Urban Studies Program. Professor Orr's expertise is in the area of American politics. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics. He is the author and editor of eight books. His book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs, Jr. (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), is the first biography of Michigan's first Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Among Professor Orr's other books, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore (University Press of Kansas), won the Policy Studies Organization's Aaron Wildavsky Award and his co-authored, The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton University Press), was named the best book by the American Political Science Association's (APSA) Urban Politics Section. He is the coeditor (with Domingo Morel) of Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles, essays, and reviews.

In 2019, Professor Orr was awarded the APSA's Hanes Walton, Jr. Career Award that honors a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics. Professor Orr is the recipient of Biographers International Organization Francis "Frank" Rollin Fellowship. He has also held a research fellowship at the Brookings Institution, a Presidential Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Professor Orr served as President of the APSA's Organized Section on Urban Politics and as Chair of the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association (UAA), an international organization devoted to the study of urban issues. Dr. Orr has also served as a member of the executive councils of the American Political Science Association and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He has served, or is currently serving, on the editorial boards of the National Political Science Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, and Urban Affairs Review.

Today’s conversation is with Irvin Hunt, who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at University of Illinois. He is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, which won Honorable Mention in the William Scarborough Sanders Prize competition in 2023, and he is at work on two books, a study of contemporary Black poetry titled A New Language for Grief and another titled I Can't Make You Speak: Stories. He is also co-writer of the script for Khalil Joseph's film BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. In this conversation, we discuss the critical Black literary tradition, horizons of expressive culture, and the politics of thinking and doing Black Studies in the contemporary moment. 

Today's conversation is with Jeanine Staples-Dixon, a Professor of Literacy and Language, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State's Colleges of Education and Liberal Arts. She also serves as Senior Faculty Mentor for the university, through the Office of Educational Equity. A long-time leader in Critical New Literacies Studies and teacher education, she's currently writing her two forthcoming books, Extraordinary Pedagogies: An Endarkened Feminist Approach To Revolutionizing Teacher Consciousness (Teachers College Press, 2024) and Extraordinary Literacies: Regarding the Literate Lives of Black Girls and Women In Schools & Society (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026). She teaches LLED 580, CI 590, and CI 501 for Penn State's World Campus. Her website is: https://jeaninestaples.com

Today’s conversation is with Allison A. Waite, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. She has worked on a number of films and has produced, written, and directed a number of pieces including The Dope Years, a documentary on the life and death of Latasha Harlins. In this conversation, we discuss the political significance of art as a facilitator of empathy, the importance of authenticity and voice in Black art making, and the responsibilities of creatives and writers in relation to community. 

Today's conversation is with Joyce E. King, Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership and Professor of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education & Human Development at Georgia State University. Previously, King held senior academic affairs positions as Provost at Spelman College, Associate Provost at Medgar Evers College, CUNY and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Diversity Programs at the University of New Orleans. She was director of teacher education for twelve years at Santa Clara University and the first head of the Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College. She completed two prestigious leadership programs: the American Council on Education Fellowship at Stanford University with the President, the Vice President for Planning and Management, and the Office for Multicultural Development. As a W.K. Kellogg National Fellowship recipient, King also studied women’s leadership and grassroots participation in social change in China, Brazil, France, Kenya, Japan, Mali and Peru.

Widely respected in the fields of urban education and the sociology of education,  King’s research has contributed to the knowledge-base on preparing teachers for diversity and curriculum theorizing through her scholarship, teaching practice and leadership. She served on the Curriculum Commission of the State Board of Education.

Recent publications include the Harvard Educational Review, The Handbook of Research on Black Education, The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education and Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black Pioneers. In addition, King organized and edited a landmark book, Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century that was published for the American Educational Research Association (2005).

She has served as co-editor of the top-ranked Review of Educational Research, and her concept of “dysconscious racism” continues to influence research and practice in education and sociology as well in the U.S. and in other countries. A forthcoming book produced in collaboration with teacher educators and classroom teachers is: “Re-membering” History in Student and Teacher Learning: An Afrocentric and Culturally Informed Praxis.

Today’s conversation is a collaboration between the podcast’s editorial collective: Brie Gorrell, Olivia Blucker, John Drabinski, and Ashley Newby.In this conversation, we discuss the experience of recording two hundred conversations, how it has impacted our thinking about the field of Black Studies, what those conversations say about the past and future of the field, and what sort of new questions have been opened up for us across The Black Studies Podcast.

Today’s conversation is with Jaz Riley, Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing challenge of community for Black Studies research, the critical intervention made by emerging questions of gender for the field, and the politics of Black study in the contemporary university. 

Today's conversation is with Carole Boyce-Davies, Chair and Professor of African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2023 to present). She is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Humane Letters in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor Emerita of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University where she taught from 2007-2023. From the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was a popular award-winning professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. In 1997, she was recruited to build the African Diaspora Studies Program at Florida International University where she served three successful terms until 2007 when she joined the Cornell faculty. An African Diaspora and Black Feminist Studies scholar in scholarship and in practice, she is a popular speaker on several related topics. In 2015, she was appointed to the prestigious Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon which she deferred and was Visiting Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Beijing, China 2016.. In 2022, she was a visiting professor at the School of Foreign Languages (FLEX), University of Havana during which time she conducted interviews on women and leadership in Cuba, focusing largely on Havana.

Today's conversation is with Christopher Tounsel, an historian of modern Sudan, with special focus on race and religion as political technologies. His first book, Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke 2021), was named a finalist for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora's Outstanding First Book Award and was a Finalist for the Christianity Today Book Award (History/Biography). His most recent book, Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell, 2024), has received honorable mention for the International Studies Association Book Award (Diplomatic Studies section). He has provided Sudan-related commentary for outlets including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, and NPR's Throughline.

Today’s conversation is with Nicole Telfer, who teaches in the Department of Psychology at Notre Dame of Maryland University. She is the author of a number of essays in both scholarly and popular venues concerned with education, disability, and the lives of Black children. In this conversation, we discuss the impact of Black Studies on psychology research, the significance of the intersection of Black study and research on disability, and the importance of childhood in thinking about Black life. 

Today’s conversation is with Rebecca Wanzo, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of Black study, the place of graphic and popular arts in Black Studies research, and the relevance of critical theoretical work for the field. 

Today’s conversation is with Shanice Robinson-Blacknell, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Shanice’s research and teaching revolve around pedagogy, activism, and the relationship between academic work and community intervention and collaboration. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of education and pedagogy in Black Studies classrooms, the meaning of community for the past and future of the field, and the distinctiveness of Black ways of making and deploying critical knowledge. 

Today's conversation is with Tamara T. Butler, a community cultivator and thought leader who draws upon lessons learned growing up on Johns Island, South Carolina. Currently, she serves as the Executive Director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and Associate Dean of Strategic Planning & Community Engagement for the College of Charleston Libraries. 

At the College of Charleston, she is a member of the Executive Committee for African American Studies. Beyond campus, Dr. Butler serves as a commissioner for the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a board member for the Coastal Conservation League and International African American Museum and a trustee for the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation.  

The Charleston County School of the Arts alum went on to earn degrees from Xavier University of Louisiana and THE Ohio State University. Prior to joining the team at the Avery Research Center, Dr. Butler was an Associate Professor of Critical Literacies at Michigan State University. As a scholar teaching and working at the intersections of English Education, African American Studies and Ecology, she has authored over 10 journal articles and book chapters that explore youth activism, civic engagement, Black Girlhood, and placemaking. In her co-authored book, Where is the Justice? Engaged Pedagogies in Schools and Communities, Dr. Butler highlights transformative education that centers community partnerships, student voices, and creative educators. 

Today’s conversation is with Chelsea Mikael Frazier, who teaches in the Department of English at Cornell University. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is completing a manuscript that assembles a Black feminist ecology drawn from Black women’s art, activism, and storytelling. She also hosts and directs the educational consultation platform Ask An Amazon. In this conversation, we discuss the place of ecological and environmental questions in the field of Black Studies, Black feminist innovations in the field, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century. 

Today's conversation is with Sara E. Johnson, who teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.  She is a literary historian who specializes in cultural production of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century Caribbean across linguistic and imperial boundaries.  She co-directed the UCSD Black Studies Project from 2021-2025.  Her most recent book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (2023), works with archival fragments to center the world of enslaved knowledge production that made Moreau’s research life and academic fame possible.  It was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, along with prizes from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Historical Association (AHA), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and the French Colonial Historical Society.  Her first book, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (2012) is an inter-disciplinary study that explored how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.  The book traces expressions of transcolonial black politics in places including Hispaniola, Louisiana, Jamaica, and Cuba, through forms including performance idioms and early black newspapers. Johnson is also the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (2006) and Una ventana a Cuba y los Estudios cubanos (2010). 

Today’s conversation is with Takiyah Harper-Shipman, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is the author of Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019) and her second monograph, Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of political economy in the field of Black Studies, transnational and comparative study, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century. 

Today’s conversation is with Michael Gillespie, who teaches in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Along with a number of scholarly essays and critical pieces in key journals and collections, he is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016), co-editor with Lisa Uddin of the groundbreaking art criticism collection Black One Shot, and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Pleasure, Ambivalence, and the Art of Blackness. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as a wide-frame for inquiry, the place of expressive culture in the field, and the particular challenges and gifts of cinema studies for work on Black life.

Today’s conversation is with Jarvis McInnis, who teaches in the Department of English at Duke University. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, he is author of Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, published by Columbia University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the rural Black south in Black Studies, the expansiveness of thinking and theorizing Black life, and how a Black Studies approach to archives and evidence broadens our notion of who does and what is intellectual work. 

Today's conversation is with Janet E. Helms, Augustus Long Professor Emeritus in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at Boston College and Co-Founder of Psychologists for Racial Justice.

Today’s conversation is with Christina Carney, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at University of Missouri. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, she is author of Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego, published by University of California Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative role of gender and class in Black Studies discourse, the importance of Black California for thinking about African American life, and the imperatives for Black Studies to take sexual economies seriously when theorizing the structure of Black life.

Today's conversation is with Ronald Stephens, who teaches in the Program in African American Studies at Purdue University, where he is hosting centennial conference on the life and work of Robert F. Williams (22 October 2025). A nationally and internationally recognized expert on the historically significant African American resort in Idlewild, Michigan, he has authored several important works, including Idlewilde: The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Idlewild: the Black Eden of Michigan (Arcadia, 2001). He is lead co-editor of three volumes: Global Garveyism (University of Florida, 2019), Chicken Bone Beach (Arcadia Publishing, 2023), and African Americans of Denver (Arcadia, 2008), and he is the author of twelve academic journal articles in publications such as the Journal of Black Studies, The Black Scholar, and Black Diaspora Review. He has an article in press with the Michigan Historical Review entitled, “Trailblazers of Justice: Violette Neatley Anderson and Percy J. Langster’s Legal Legacies in Idlewild: the Black Eden and Summer Apollo of Michigan.” Dr. Stephens is currently writing Robert and Mabel Williams: Matrimonial Partnership in Black Resistance History and pursuing a book contract with Wayne State University Press. 

Dr. Stephens has appeared as an expert for numerous media outlets including NPR, the HIstory Channel, and the Smithsonian Channel. Notable features include appearances in the documentaries Negroes with Guns and The Green Book: Road to Freedom, as well as Tony Brown’s Journal, Black Nouveau and HGTV’s Historic African American Towns. His contributions continue to deepen our understanding of African American leisure culture, and resistance history. Recently, he launched The Resilience Journey, a 40-minute bi-weekly podcast based on the experiences of Robert and Mabel Williams as a testament to the power of defiance in the face of oppression and the enduring spirit in the fight for human dignity and equality. The show explores stories of perseverance and empowerment, and where history’s echoes shape our past and future. Each episode dives deep into stories of resistance, resilience, courage, and the relentless pursuit of justice through the lens of those who’ve lived it. 

He plans to continue the Resilience Journey and write two other African American biographies - 1. About producer Larry Steele from his Smart Affairs revue from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s; and 2. About John White and the Gotham Hotel of Detroit  

Dr. Stephens has over a decade of administrative leadership experience, having served as department chair at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Ohio University, as well as program director of African American Studies at various other institutions. He was born and grew up in Detroit. He attended Detroit Public Schools, and graduated from Wayne State University, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in Speech Communication and M.A. and PhD from Temple University in African American Studies. He is the father of two daughters (Kiara and Karielle) and proud grandfather of twelve grandchildren.

Today's conversation is with Mia Bay, Paul Mellon Professor of American History at University of Cambridge. Mia Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history. A graduate of University of Toronto, she completed her post graduate studies at Yale University under the supervision of David Brion Davis. In recent years, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and before that she taught at Rutgers University, where she also directed the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.

Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which also received a PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, the Lillian Smith book Award, the Order of the Coif Book Award and the  David J, Langum Prize in Legal History. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2012, 1st Edition, 2016, 2nd Edition), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line( Rutgers University Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.  

Bay’s current projects include a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson.  Her work has been supported by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Fletcher Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello; the American Council of Learned Societies, Boston University’s Institute on Race and Social Division, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and W.E.B. Du Bois Centers; and the American Historical Association.  An Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Bay is a member of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s advisory board and serves on the editorial boards of Reviews in American History, the Journal of African American History, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives Blog.  

Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits-- “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968”-- and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project. 

Today’s conversation is with writer and critic Michael Harriot. Along with numerous journalistic pieces in venues such as The Root, Yes! Magazine, TheGrio.com, he is author of the award-winning book Black AF History: The UnWhitewashed Story of America, published by Dey Street Books in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of study in journalistic and popular writing, the varied and deep roots of Black study, and the cultural and political responsibilities that come with writing about Black life in the twenty-first century. 

Today's conversation is with Sabrina Evans, who teaches in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University where she specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature with a focus on Black women's writing, archives, and organizing. Her research examines the intellectual thought and literary production of Black clubwomen such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett as well as the networks and communities that helped sustain their intellectual and activist work. She is project co-coordinator for the Black Women's Organizing Archive (BWOA). BWOA is a digital humanities project that seeks to locate the scattered archives of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black women organizers and create teaching and research resources. In this work, she has collaborated with a team of faculty, graduate students, archivists, and librarians to produce papers locators featuring digitized and nondigitized collections of early Black women organizers as well as a digital map highlighting the various libraries and repositories holding their collections.

Today's conversation is with Johnathan White, who teaches in the Department of History at Penn State, Greater Allegheny. He has taught courses in history, African American studies, black arts, and leadership development. He co-founded the Study of Hip-Hop Conference and the Stewart and Jones Scholar Leadership Program. He is a founding member of the Crossing Bridges committee which serves the surrounding community. In addition, he chairs the Anti-Racism task force at PSUGA. He is also creator of the Black Woman Reaffirmed video project. His up coming album, Love Algorithms, is an eclectic mix of poetry, hip-hop, and spoken word. Finally, he is co-authoring a book, ‘A Love We Need…’, which examines what a divided America can learn from 50 years of Hip Hop culture. He is a board member of the Langston Hughes Poetry Society. In addition, he served as lead instructor of the Full Armor Institute, mentoring young black men at Mt. Olive Baptist church. Moreover, he has conducted black history workshops and seminars on living a vibrant lifestyle that synthesizes faith and the pursuit of social justice. He was awarded the Dr. James Robinson Equal Opportunity Award (honoring those who fight for equity at Penn State) in 2021. He received the highly competitive Atherton Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021 as well. Finally, in 2022 he was a Pittsburgh Courier Men of Excellence honoree. He was recognized for his contribution in the field of education.

Today’s conversation is with Watufani Poe, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Along with scholarly and public-facing pieces, he is completing a manuscript entitled Resisting Fragmentation: The Embodied Politics of Black Queer Worldmaking, an ethnohistoric study of Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in Brazil and the United States that outlines how Black LGBTQ+ people push for freedom across various social and political movement spaces and imagine alternative worlds. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of language and transnational work in Black Studies, the political impact of Black study, and the place of questions of gender and sexuality in the field. 

Today's conversation is with Davarian Baldwin, Raether Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College. He is the award-winning author of several books, most recently In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities and worked as the consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle. In addition to teaching and writing, Baldwin has served in the national leadership of the American Association of University Professors and Scholars for Social Justice and sits on several editorial boards including the Journal of African American History and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. His commentaries and opinions have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, BBC, and HULU to USA Today, The Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Baldwin was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work in racial and economic justice.

Today’s conversation is with Natasha Henry-Dixon, who teaches in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Along with numerous scholarly and public-facing pieces, she is the author of Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (2010), Talking about Freedom (2012). She also maintains the website One Too Many: Black People Enslaved in Upper Canada, 1760-1834. In this conversation, we discuss the history of Black people in Canada, the complicated relationship between the four centuries of Black presence and the place of immigrants in the Black Canadian imagination, and the importance of public history, education, and Black study. 

Today's conversation is with Tara T. Green, who is the CLASS Distinguished Professor and Chair of African American Studies at the University of Houston. She also has a joint appointment in the English department. Dr. Green is a literary and interdisciplinary studies scholar with a doctorate in English. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books, including Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era as well as the co-curator of the Triad Black Lives Matter Collection housed at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Black feminism and her Southern familial experiences with storytelling influence her approach to her research areas, which include African American fiction and autobiography, African literature, Black leadership/activism, Black Southern studies, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is from the suburbs of New Orleans, which immensely impacts her work.

Tony Louis is a veteran educator with extensive experience in the public school systems of New York, Florida, and Maryland. A specialist in advanced instruction, he has primarily taught International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) literature courses and served as an MYP coordinator. His pedagogy is rooted in the belief that learning is both critical and contextual—an active process in which students collaborate to construct meaning and engage deeply with the world around them. He is also a staunch advocate for educational equity, holding that all students deserve meaningful access to higher education. In pursuit of this mission, he has taught Literature and Critical Race Theory courses for Upward Bound programs at Morehouse College and Rollins College. Over the past three years, he has also pioneered the teaching of Hip-Hop history and culture at the secondary level in Maryland, one of the few such courses in the state.

Through his Power Dreaming initiative, Louis remains committed to amplifying student voices by fostering direct dialogue with leading scholars, artists, and thought leaders—without intermediaries. His career reflects both a passion for intellectual rigor and a dedication to cultivating joy, engagement, and empowerment in the classroom.

Today’s conversation is with Rosa Clemente, a scholar, activist, and late-doctoral candidate in the Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In this conversation, we explore the complex questions of Afro-Latinx identity, cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarity, and the meaning of Black Studies in times of deep political crisis. 

Today's conversation is with Anna LaQuawn Hinton, assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) and CLA Journal, as well as contributed to The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, and The Palgrave Handbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature. Her monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing, which approaches themes in Black feminist literary studies such as aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity through a Black feminist disability frame, is now available through the University Press of Mississippi. Dr. Hinton is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.

Today’s conversation is with Leonard McKinnis, who teaches in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Along with a number of scholarly pieces, he is the author of The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the place of religious studies in the Black Studies tradition, the relationship between ethnographic and historical research, and how close attention to emerging Black religious sensibilities reveal ethical and political visions to Black study. 

Today's conversation is with Lisa Ze Winters, Associate Professor of African American Studies and English and Associate Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Currently, she is consumed with the day-to-day practice of mothering a Black girl in the time of now, and her current research interests center on Black motherhood and Black radical love and the possibilities therein in for imagining and enacting freedom for Black children. Her most recent essay, “Fugitive Motherhood, Maroon Revisions, and Otherwise Possibilities in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter” (J19, 2024), examines Brown’s theorization of the ontological labor of enslaved mothering and the revolutionary possibilities of fugitivity and marronage for the fugitive mother Clotel. Ze Winters is the author of The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (2016, UGA Press)

Today's conversation is with Mazi Mutafa, founding Executive Director of Words Beats & Life, a hip-hop non-profit established in Washington D.C in 2002. Mr. Mutafa received his Bachelor’s degree in African American studies from the University of Maryland and  became a Brother of Phi BetaSigma Fraternity. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and George Washington University and, in 2019, was an adjunct professor at American University, co-teaching a course about international hip-hop, called “Whose Hip-Hop Is It?" He contributed a chapter to the Handbook of Research on Black Males, published by Michigan State University Press and an interview with Mazi is included in The Hip-Hop Mindset: A Professional Practice on Rutledge Press. Mr. Mutafa is also the host of a hip-hop show called “Live @ 5,” heard quarterly on WPFW 89.3 FM, featuring performances and interviews with MC’s, poets, DJ’s, producers, and vocalists. Mr. Mutafa is also the host of a poetry and activism show called “Something to Say” every Tuesday on WPFW 89.3 FM, featuring performances and interviews with poets, artists, activists and leaders.

Today’s conversation is with Cassie Osei, who teaches in the Department of History at Bucknell University, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Latin American Studies program. She works at the intersection of Latin American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Black Women’s History and her scholarship, teaching and public speaking span the fields of Brazilian studies, Afro-Latin America, Black women’s intellectual thought, Black diasporic feminisms, urban history, gender and sexuality studies, global labor history, and comparative race relations. She is currently completing a book manuscript examining the lives of paid Afro-Brazilian female household workers in the twentieth-century, who insisted on defining themselves as modern workers and dignified women, typically obscured by the loud legacies of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin America in discussions of Blackness, the importance of diaspora for Black Studies thinking, and the transformative meaning of multi-lingual research approaches. 

Osei's peer-reviewed work appears in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and Black Perspectives, whereas her public-facing work has been featured in Anglophone and Lusophone media outlets. She holds both a PhD and Masters in History from University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and a BA in History and Latin American Studies from the University of Kansas. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between the study of Blackness and Latin America, the politics and debates around notions of diaspora, and how a hemispherically expansive vision of Black Studies reorients and challenges the field.

Today's conversation is with Crystal Eddins, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a dual
major PhD in African American & African Studies and Sociology from Michigan State University. Her areas of research and teaching include the African Diaspora, Social Movements and Revolutions, Race and Ethnicity, Women and Gender, and Atlantic World slavery. Her book, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution (2021), is an interdisciplinary case study that explores the relationship between ritual life, collective consciousness, and marronnage before the Haitian Revolution. Eddins has published other research articles in the Journal of Haitian Studies, Gender & History, the Journal of World-Systems Research, and Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change. She is currently developing a second project tentatively titled Black Queens of the Atlantic World, exploring enslaved women’s power, reproduction, and resistance in eighteenth-century British and French Caribbean colonies.

Today’s conversation is with Nick Mitchell, who teaches in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research explores the political economy of the university and its intersection with questions of austerity, race, gender, and the founding of Black Studies. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between critical politics and institutionalization, intellectual work and the radicalization of educational space, and the future of the university in a Black Studies horizon..

Today's conversation is with Dexter Blackman, who teaches in the Department of History, Geography, and Museum Studies at Morgan State University. He researches and studies in the fields of African American, the African Diaspora, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Cold War histories, and African-American Studies. He is currently completing the book manuscript, We Are Standing Up for Humanity: Black Power, the Black Athletic Experience, and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights.

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.

Today's conversation is with Keith Holmes, a researcher, historian and author, and founder of Global Black Inventor Research Projects. Mr. Holmes has spent over thirty years researching innovations, inventions and patents by Black innovators & inventors. Researching inventors through the NY Patent Library, the Schomburg Library, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center among other places, Keith Holmes has picked up the baton from Henry E, Baker and has compiled a growing list of over 20,000 (1769-2025) innovations, inventions and trademarks by Black men and women from over eighty countries and five continents. He has lectured in Antigua, Barbados, California, Canada, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, DC. Mr. Holmes has done virtual lectures in Los Angeles, Maryland, Tallahassee, Toronto and London. He is currently working on several projects about Black inventors and his book Black Inventors, Crafting Over 200 Years of Success is now in paperback and ebook formats.

Today’s conversation is with Katherine Ponds, a late-doctoral candidate in the Department of American and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research explores the relationship between ancient Greek notions of the tragic and contemporary African American theater. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between classics and work in Black Studies, comparative work as Black study and scholarship, and the varied resonances of “the tragic” in descriptions of Black life in an antiblack world.

Today’s conversation is with Jeanelle Hope, who teaches in and is Director of the program in African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is co-author with Bill V. Mullen of The Black Antifascist Tradition (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the anti-fascist theory and practice in the Black Studies tradition, comparative racial and ethnic study, and the importance of critical theoretical work in the history and future of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Amiri Mahnzili, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching interests range across pan-African concerns with history, memory, expressive life, and radical political mobilization. With Lawson Bush and Edward C. Bush, he is co-author of Sankofa (Re)search Model: (Re)membevring, (Re)storing, and (Re)birthing Black Boys and Men (2025) In this conversation, we discuss the importance of pedagogy in Black Studies, radical politics, and the place of pan-African intellectual and political work for the history and future of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Tiffany E. Barber, who teaches in the Department of Art History at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing pieces, she is the author of Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the place of expressive culture in Black Studies, gender, race, and art historical research, and the importance of multidisciplinary work on expressive life for the history and future of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Seulghee Lee, who teaches in the Departments of English  and African American Studies at University of South Carolina. In addition to a number of scholarly pieces, he is the author of OtherLovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (2025) and co-editor with Rebecca Kumar of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between literary and expressive culture in Black Studies, comparative racial and ethnic study, and the importance of critical theoretical work in the history and future of the field.

Today's conversation is with Jimmy Butts, who teaches in the Department of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His research focuses on Black religion and radicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries with an emphasis on the discourses and practices that operate at the intersection of religion and violence. His current book project examines the way Malcolm X constructed a revolutionary form of religion over the course of his public life.

Today’s conversation is with J.T. Roane, who teaches in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing pieces, he is the author of Dark Agora: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, published by New York University Press in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between historical writing, research, and Black Studies sensibilities, community work and study, and the place of ecological thinking in the history and future of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Aria Halliday, who teaches in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American and Africana Studies at University of Kentucky. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of two books: Black Girls and How We Fail Them (2025) and Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed U.S. Pop Culture (2022), as well as the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019). In this conversation, we discuss the place of gender studies and historical experience in the study of Black life, the ethics and politics of the field, and how Black Studies sensibilities change the nature of research and pedagogy.

Today’s conversation is with Tracie Canada, who teaches in the Departments of Cultural Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the founding director of the Health, Ethnography and Race through Sports Lab and is the author of Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football. In this conversation, we discuss the cultural and racial politics of sports, particularly sports in higher-ed spaces, and the place of those racial politics in Black Studies and in the study of Black life.

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author most recently of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration and of the more recent Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake, which was published by New York University Press in April 2025.

Today’s conversation is with Brian Kwoba, who teaches in the Department of History at University of Memphis where he is also the director of African American Studies. Along with a number of scholarly articles, Brian is the author of the new book Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, out in 2025 with University of North Carolina Press. In this conversation, we discuss the role of Black Studies sensibilities in the writing of history and the importance of the long story of Black radicalism for the study of Black life.

Today’s conversation is with Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, who teaches in the Department of English at Coppin State University. In addition to a number of collections of poetry and edited volumes on education and race, she is poet laureate of Prince George’s County in Maryland. In this conversation, we discuss the place of education in the formation of the Black Studies imagination and the centrality of creative work for the study of Black life and liberations struggle.

Today’s conversation is with Mari Crabtree, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Emerson College in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is the author of My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (2022) and is currently working on two book-length projects: Co-Opted: Essays on Black Studies and Ethical Praxis in the Age of Neoliberalism and Guile: The Pleasures and Political Utility of Subversion in the African American Cultural Tradition. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies informs her conception of writing history, the place of politics and culture in the field, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape thinking, pedagogy, and everyday practice.

Today's conversation is with  Carleen Carey, a public educator with over 15 years of experience across K-12 and higher education sectors. Before founding Akoma Leadership Consulting, she served as Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Director of Public Outreach and Equity, College and Career Readiness Manager, and Instructor of Record for  government, non-profit, and higher education organizations. In these roles, she led a portfolio of programs including Hidden Histories, EEOC Training Corner, Women’s Leadership Lunch, and Community Coalition. In the K-12 sector, Dr. Carey led the transition to remote education for Career and Technical Education teachers through professional workshops such as Race and Ability in the CTE Classroom, Tech Tune-Ups for  CTE Teachers, and Digital Download: Connecting Students with Careers. She also taught Human Diversity, Power, and Opportunity in the Teacher Certification program at Michigan State University. Carey currently teaches "African American Authors from 1700-1900," "African-American Authors from 1900-present," and early American Literature at the University of Maryland Global Campus.

Today’s conversation is with Darius Spearman, who teaches in the program in Black Studies at San Diego City College. He is the author of two books, Between the Color Lines: A History of African Americans on the California Frontier from 1769 through Reconstruction (2015) and Legacy of Survival: The Dynamics of the Black Family (2025), as well as two edited volumes under the title Reclaiming Our Stories (2020 and 2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of region and historical experience in the study of Black life, the critical relationship between ethnic studies and Black Studies, and how commitment to community shifts the meaning of pedagogy and the classroom.

Today's conversation is with Leroy F. Moore, Jr., founder of The Krip-Hop Institute and doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Moore is an award-winning writer and political organizer, and in this conversation we discuss the nature of activist work, the place of disability in Black Studies, and the history of expressive cultural work of Black disabled artists and musicians.

Today's conversation is with Lee Hawkins, a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and author of the 2025 book I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of personal histories, journalistic work, and the persistence of trauma across time and generation.

Today's conversation is with Meredith D. Clark, who teaches in the Hussman School of Journalism at University of North Carolina, Chapel Heill. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power – covering everything from media processes like newsroom hiring and reporting practices to the digital narratives constructed by social media communities. Clark has studied Black Twitter since 2010, and is currently completing a book-length study of it. TheRoot.com named her as one of the most 100 influential Black Americans on their 2015 Root 100 list.

Today’s conversation is with Katherine McKittrick, who teaches in the Department of Gender Studies and is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), as well as editing and contributing to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015). Recent projects include the limited-edition boxset, Trick Not Telos (2023), the limited-edition hand-made book, Twenty Dreams (2024),and an installation honoring the poet nourbeSe philip, A Smile Split by the Stars. She has a number of forthcoming projects including Yarns (2027) and the co-edited artbook, Smile (2026). In this conversation, we discuss how questions of gender and sexuality shift the field of Black Studies, the expansiveness of Black Studies insights in thinking diaspora and nation, and the relationship between study, conversation, and the imagination.

Today's conversation is with Valerie Grim, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. As a scholar, Grim researches and publishes in the area of twentieth and twenty-first centuries African American rural history. She has conducted research and provided lectures in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Currently, she has completed Between Paternalism and Self-Determination: Rural African American Life in a Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Community, 1910-1970 (revision in process for publication). She has completed a book (also under revision) on the Brooks Farm Community, formerly known as the Brooks Farm plantation located in Sunflower and Leflore Counties in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Her current book projects - Between Forty Acres and a Class Action: Black Farmers’ Protest against the United States Government, 1995-2010s and Black Land Grant Universities and African American Rural Development, 1990 to the present - focus on the needs of African Americans in rural America and efforts to help them achieve full democratic participation and engagement with federal farm and rural development policies and programs. She also is co-authoring a volume on Rural Students in Higher Education. Grim has edited several journal special issue volumes, including Agency Reduction in the Experiences and Realities of Africana People (International Journal of Africana Studies, 2018); Spirit, Mind, and Body: Research and Engagement in an African American and African Diaspora Studies Graduate Course (Black Diaspora Review, 2011); The Experiences of Rural Women, Children, and Families of Color in U.S. and Global Communities (Rural Women, Families, and Children of Color, 2009); and American Rural and Farm Women (Agricultural History, 1990). 

In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of rural histories for thinking gender and race, how Black Studies impacts the study and writing of history, and how Black study forms classrooms, community work, and the historical imagination.

Today’s conversation is with Kaila Story, who is the Audre Lorde Endowed Chair at the University of Louisville where teaches in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Pan-African Studies. She is the author of The Rainbow Ain't Never Been Enuf: On The Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity (out in May 2025). She is also the co-creator, co-producer, and co-host of Louisville Public Media’s Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture, and Black Gay Life, a popular award-winning podcast. In this conversation, we discuss how questions of gender and sexuality shift the field of Black Studies, the expansiveness of Black Studies insights, and the relationship between study, conversation, and the classroom.

Today’s conversation is with Tamara J. Walker, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Her work explores race, travel, movement, and place in both Latin American history, which produced the book Exquisite Slaves: Race Clothing and Status in Colonial Lima (2017), and in stories of African American global travel in her recent book Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin American in the Black Studies imagination, the meaning of movement and travel for understanding Black life, and how inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches to Black life change historical writing.

Today’s conversation is with Taelore Marsh, Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archives Archivist to the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In this conversation, we discuss the significance of archival construction, Black feminist methodologies for that construction, and how a commitment to the whole person changes the memory and history structure of an archive.

Today’s conversation is with Fanon Che Wilkins, who teaches in the Department of History at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. His teaching and research work focuses on the history of Black radicalism across the Atlantic world, with particular focus on pan-African thought, congresses, and mobilizations in the mid- and later-twentieth century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational solidarity, the complexity of radical politics in Black Studies, and the transformative work of historical research and writing for political and cultural action.

Today’s conversation is with Johanna Faith Almiron, a longtime educator, organizer, and scholar currently based in Nyack, New York, and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Her award-winning scholarship on the visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has been featured nationally and internationally at major museums and galleries,including the Guggenheim, theMuseum of Fine Arts Boston, the Nahmad Gallery, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. She has penned groundbreaking cultural criticism and essays in LitHub, ArtNews, Public Seminar, LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Rizzoli Press with recognition from the New York Times’ Shortlist, and Vanity Fair. She has taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Cooper Union School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between black studies and ethnic studies, the role of performance and movement in relation to identity and coalition building, and the philosophies and politics of black artists and creatives who’ve guided and influenced the political-intellectual journey of Dr. Almiron

Today's discussion is with Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean and Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland. Shel was appointed Dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities in 2011, having joined the university in 1991 as Professor and served as Chair of the Women’s Studies department for eight years. A pioneering scholar on the intersections of race, class and gender in the U.S. with an emphasis on African-American women, work and families, she is founding director of both the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at UMD. Her scholarship includes three books and numerous articles.

She is former president of the National Women’s Studies Association; former vice president of the American Sociological Association; and former chair of the Committee of Scholars for Ms. magazine.

Today’s conversation is with Eola Dance and Jennie K. Williams, co-founders and directors of the Kinfolkology project, which explores the complex intersection of data, memory, and descendent communities in the history of enslavement. Eola Dance is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Howard University and Jennie K. Williams is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of data for history, how memory of the enslaved is both inside and outside data, and what obligations curators of slavery’s data have to descendent communities.

Today's conversation is with André Brock, Jr., who teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. His scholarly work includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, Black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter in his book Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020). His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.

Today’s conversation is with Stephanie Shonekan, who is Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at University of Maryland, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African American and Africana Studies. She is the author of a number of critical essays on music and the Black Studies tradition, with particular focus on the relationship between expressive culture and identity, and is the author of Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (2015), Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s Sorrow Tears and Blood (2025), and Race and the American Story, co-authored with Adam Seagrave in 2024. In this conversation, we discuss the place of musicological research in the field, the importance of transnational studies, and the challenges for Black Studies in higher-ed’s contemporary cultural and political moment.

Today’s conversation is with Kojo Damptey, a musician and scholar who is completing doctoral studies in the School of Social Work at McMaster University. His musical work engages with trans-Atlantic sound connections and political meaning, which draws from his academic research in Afrocentrism, indigenous African systems of knowledge, and decolonial theoretical frameworks. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between study and musical practice, the political meaning of sound, and the significance of art for cultural and social liberation work.

Today’s conversation is with Corey D.B. Walker, who is Dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University where he is also Inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. His work is ambitious with focus on key figures in the African American intellectual tradition, political and cultural moments of liberation struggle, and the meaning of religious traditions in Black American history. Along with numerous scholarly articles and edited volumes, he is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (2008) and is completing a book-length manuscript entitled Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy. At Wake Forest University, he is also the Principle Investigator for the Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative. In this conversation, we discuss the complex political and cultural origins of the field of Black Studies, the place of religious study in the field, and how future work in Black Studies might address existential questions of environmental degradation, racism, the future of the planet.

Today's conversation is with Sharon Harley, who teaches in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on Black women's labor history and racial and gender politics. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited and contributed essays in the pioneer anthology, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978). She has edited and contributed to two anthologies Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers, 2002) and Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (Rutgers, 2008), resulting from two major Ford Foundation grants. She recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and "I Don't Pay Those Borders No Mind At All:” Audley E. Moore (“Queen “Mother Moore) – Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist: Reframing Black Nationalist/Pan-Africanist Engagement” in Women and Migrations (2018). In this conversation, we discuss her journey into Black Studies, the importance of telling Black women's history in relation to public but also underground economies, and the expansive future of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Paul Joseph López Oro, who teaches in and is the director of the Program in Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. His work focuses on the history, identity, and complex epistemologies of Black Latinx communities and cultures, with specific attention to Garifuna histories in the hemisphere, which is the focus of his forthcoming book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin America broadly and Central America in particular in the Black Studies imagination, the promise of thinking without imaginary and political borders, and the transformative work of Black queer studies in the history and future of the field.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today’s conversation is with Charles Athanasopoulos, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of a number of scholarly pieces on politics and Black cultural life, as well as the book Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post-Ferguson America. In this conversation, we discuss the role of rhetorical traditions in Black Studies, iconic figures and moments in Black history and culture, and the various expressions of blackness and Black life in the political work of liberation struggle.

Today’s conversation is with Marisa Parham, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Maryland where she is also Director of African American and Experimental Digital Humanities and Associate Director of Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities. Along with numerous articles in scholarly and public facing venues, she is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture and co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. In this conversation, we discuss the formation of Black Studies between and beyond disciplines, the relation between skill acquisition and expressive culture in the field, and the centrality of collaborative, experimental work in the study of Black life.

Today’s conversation is with Kesewa John, who teaches in the Department of History at Goldsmiths University in London, England. Her scholarship addresses the complex intersections of diasporic identity, national belonging and non-belonging, and the emergence of England as a multiracial society. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of Black British identity, the relationship between race and diaspora in the Black British imagination, and the complex meaning of Black Studies in England in terms of its relation to existing fields of African and Caribbean studies.

Today’s conversation is with Serie McDougal, who teaches in the Department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Research Methods in Africana Studies, which was published in 2014. In this conversation, we discuss questions of method and discipline in Black Studies, psychological and sociological aspects of research into Black life, and the ebb and flow of the field’s popularity and visibility.

Today’s conversation is with Marlene Daut, who teaches in the Departments of French and African American Studies at Yale University. Along with numerous articles in public and scholarly venues, she is the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2015); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (2017); Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (2023); and most recently The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the place of Haiti in the Black Studies imagination, the creative and archival dimension of writing history, and the significance of transnational study in the field.

Today’s conversation is with Charlene Carruthers, who is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. She is a writer, filmmaker, and community organizer who is exploring questions of race, place, neighborhood, and urban space in her doctoral work. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of geography and urban studies for Black Studies research, the racial politics of cityscapes and neighborhood configuration, and the place of study and intellectual work in Black liberation struggle.

Today’s conversation is with Michele Reid-Vazquez, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College. Along with numerous scholarly articles, she is the author of The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World and is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Black Mobilities in the Age of Revolution: Politics, Migration, and Freedom in the Caribbean. She is also the host of the podcast Dialogues in Afrolatinidad, a series exploring the history and culture of black Latin America. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the hispanophone world in thinking the African diaspora, the varied notions and experiences of blackness that comprise Black Studies, and the complex relation between archival sources and the storytelling elements of writing history.

Today’s conversation is with Courtney Baker, who teaches in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. Along with numerous articles in public and scholarly venues on art and the aesthetic, she is the author of Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African-American Suffering and Death (2015). In a previous position, she was the co-founder and Chair of the Department of Black Studies at Occidental College. In this conversation, we discuss the place of art and aesthetic inquiry in Black Studies, the role of tradition in building knowledge in Black study, and the significance of the field for Black liberation struggle.

Today's discussion is with Alexander Weheliye, who teaches in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is the author of numerous articles and three critical books: Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023). In this conversation, we explore the boundaries Black Studies research, the expansiveness of its archive, and the place of cultural and political responsibility inside and outside classroom and campus work.

Today’s conversation is with La TaSha Levy, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Howard University. Her research focuses on the fraught place of Black conservatism in the history of African American political life and dissent. She is also the founder of Black Star Rising, a Black Studies curricula and consulting enterprise focused on expanding access to Black Studies beyond the ivory tower. She provides professional development training and Black history curricula for schools and school districts and collaborates with dedicated teachers on K-12 instruction in Black Studies and Ethnic Studies. Since 2022, she has served as scholar-in-residence with A Long Talk About the Uncomfortable Truth, an antiracist activation experience. Prior to graduate study, La TaSha taught Humanities at Maya Angelou Public Charter High School in D.C., which was co-founded by James Forman, Jr. She also has experience working in Student Affairs, having served as the director of the Luther P. Jackson Black Cultural Center at the University of Virginia. 

In this conversation, we discuss the singular contributions of the field of Black Studies, its internal debates and conflicts, and how Black Studies remains a centerpiece for understanding liberation struggle in a time of deep political crisis.

Today's discussion is with Stacie McCormick, who teaches in the Department of English, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research examines representations of the body, land, sexuality, and the ongoing resonance of slavery in contemporary Black writing and performance and she is the author of Staging Black Fugitivity and editor of a special issue of College Literature on the them of "Toni Morrison and Adaptation." In this conversation, we discuss gender, race, and the history of medicine, how issues arising from that intersection open important horizons in the field of Black Studies, and the persistence and insistent character of Black Studies as an area of study.

Today’s conversation is with Derrick White, who teaches in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Kentucky. He has published widely on African American intellectual history and the cultural study of sports, and is the author of The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (2011) and Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (2019). In this discussion, we explore the relation of historical work to political struggle, the place of cultural study in the Black Studies imagination, and the fecundity of post-disciplinary thinking for the field.

Today's discussion is with Jeffery Ogbar, who teaches in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut where he is also the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music. He is the author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (2004) and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (2007), as well as editor of Civil Rights: Problems in American Civilization (Houghton Mifflin 2003), The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts and Letters (2010), and co-editor with Erica R. Edwards and Roderick A. Ferguson of Keywords for African American Studies (2018). In this conversation, we discuss the place of history in the field of Black Studies and the importance of a Black Studies understanding of historical research in times of political crisis.

Today’s conversation is with Ashley Smith-Purviance, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. Her work is focused on Black girlhood, memory, and the relationship between ethnography, self-authorship, and lived experience. She is the author of the forthcoming book titled, (Un)Schooling Black Girls: Navigating Suburbia, Anti-Black-Girl Violence, and Mechanisms of School Survival and has produced the digital humanities project The Rolling Archives of Black Girlhood, a digital scrapbook that amplifies the voices of Black women and girls by uncovering the spaces and experiences that shape them. In this discussion, we explore the relation between gender and ethnographic research, childhood and its place in the Black Studies imagination, and how Black study expands the archive of Black life.

Today’s conversation is between myself, Ashley Newby, and John Drabinski, hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, reflecting on the 100th episode and what the series has taught us about the meaning of Black study and Black Studies. We discuss the unique contributions made by the field of Black Studies, how critical framings across the series impact pedagogy and research, and what sorts of hopes, aspirations, and expectations we have for the future of the podcast.

Today’s conversation is with Sharon P. Holland, who teaches in the Department of American Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Along with numerous articles and editing work, she is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (2000), The Erotic Life of Racism (2012), and an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (2023). As well, she is co-host of the podcast Dog Save The People. In this discussion, we explore questions of gender, animal life, and politics and how they open up new horizons in the field of Black Studies. 

Today's discussion is with Marisa Fuentes, who teaches in the departments of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and focus on histories of gender, slavery, the Caribbean and Black Atlantic worlds. Along with a number of scholarly articles and edited collections, she is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, which won book prizes from the Association of Black Women Historians, The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and The Barbara T. Christian Best Humanities Book Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies informs critical historical research, the theoretical and ethical problem of reading for silences, and how practices of careful, archive-attuned fabulation have deep and abiding impact on Black Atlantic and Black women's history.

Today’s conversation is with Fred Moten, who teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of a number of volumes of poetry, including most recently All That Beauty (2019) and perennial fashion, presence falling (2023), and multiple critical books that include In the Break (2003), the trilogy Consent Not to be a Single Being published in 2017 and 2018, and with Stefano Harney The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013). In this conversation, we discuss the nature of the field of Black Studies, what lessons it has for thinking politically in the present moment, and how Black study transforms notions of liberation struggle, Black life, and expressive culture.

Today’s conversation is with Abdul Alkalimat, Professor Emeritus in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is one of the original creators and innovators in the field of Black Studies, whose organizing and professional work expanded the field in terms of its professional organizations, rigor of inquiry, curriculum, and political significance. As well, he is the author of pamphlets, scholarly articles, and a number of books including most recently the critical worksA History of Black Studies and The Future of Black Studies, published in 2021 and 2022 by Pluto Press. In this discussion, we explore the nature of Black Studies inquiry, the link between Black Studies scholarly and classroom work and our various publics, and the particular ethical and political obligations that lie at the heart of the field. 

Today's discussion is with Martha Jones, who is Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She has written extensively about Atlantic world history, African American cultural and political history, and race and citizenship. She is the author of a number of books, including Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900. In this conversation, we discuss the place of history in Black Studies, the emerging importance of memoir work in the field, and the significance of her new work The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.

Today’s conversation is with Zebulon Miletsky, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to a number of public facing and scholarly pieces, he is the author of Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle. In this discussion, we explore the nature of Black Studies inquiry, the link between Black study and public knowledge, and the future culture and politics of the field..

Today’s conversation is with Alex Lubin, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Penn State University and is the president-elect of the American Studies Association. His work is informed by cultural studies and history, with specific focus on North Africa and the Arab world more broadly. He is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1956, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary, and Never-Ending War on Terror, and is completing a book entitled Third World Ensemble: African Americans in Cairo Between the Suez and Six-Day Wars. In this discussion, we explore the place of transnational study in Black Studies, the new horizons opened up by the study of non-Atlantic routes of diaspora, and the fecundity of Black study as an undisciplined, expansive, and curious practice.

Today's discussion is with Casey Wong, who teaches in the Department of Educational Policy at Georgia State University. He is the author of a number of scholarly and public-facing pieces on education history, pedagogy, hip-hop, and public policy, as well as co-editor with H. Samy Alim and Jeff Chang of Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures. In this conversation, we discuss hip hop as a source for cultural studies, pedagogical inquiry, and insight into public policy matters from childhood to higher ed to the formation of political consciousness.

Today’s conversation is with Elizabeth Hamilton, who teaches art history and African American studies at Fort Valley State University. Her work is broadly engaged with African diasporic art practices, ranging from the vernacular to Afrofuturism, and she is the author of Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art and the forthcoming Figuring It Out: Black Womanhood through the Figurative in Alison Saar's Oeuvre, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In this discussion, we explore the place of Black Studies sensibilities in art history, the politics of art and art criticism, and the significance of vernacular culture forms for understanding Black life.

Today’s conversation is with Grant Farred, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University. Along with numerous articles and edited collections, he is the author of over a dozen books, including most recently The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, The Comic Self, co-authored with Timothy Campbell, and Grievance: In Fragments. In this discussion, we explore the meaning of Black Studies pedagogy and writing, vernacular intellectual work, and the question of thinking as a compulsive and political practice.

Today's discussion is with Kellie Carter Jackson, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular essays, she is the author of Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2020) and We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (2024). As well, she has co-hosted two podcasts: This Day in Esoteric Political History and You Get a Podcast! Across this conversation, we discuss the meaning of violence and non-violence in Black Studies politics, archival and public facing research, and the place of Black women's history in the past and future of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Noliwe Rooks, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University where she is also founding director of the Segrenomics Lab. Her work is widely engage with African American women’s history, education, and cultural studies and she is the author of a number of books, including most recently A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune (2024) and Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (2025). In this discussion, we explore the relation of intellectual work to political struggle, the history and intellectual tradition of the field, and how the future of Black Studies is shaped and reshaped by contemporary concerns.

Today’s conversation is with Anthony Smith and Geo Maher, both of whom work as coordinators with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement for Abolition and Reconstruction School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Anthony Smith is an organizer and educator based in West Philly whose work addresses police violence with direct action, political education, and mutual aid. Geo Maher is an organizer with roots in liberation struggle across the Americas and is the author of a number of books, including most recently A World Without Police (2021) and Anticolonial Eruptions (2022). Both Smith and Maher were contributing editors to the Abolition School’s publication Abolition and Reconstruction: An Emergent Guide to Collective Study (2024) with Common Notions Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of study in political organizing, strategy and education in the formation of political consciousness, and future of liberation struggle.

Today's discussion is with Mary Frances Phillips, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on modern Black freedom struggle, Black Women’s Studies, and the legacies and traditions of Black feminism. In addition to scholarly and popular pieces, she has published Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (NYU Press, 2025. In this conversation, we discuss radical Black political struggle, the importance of questions of gender in thinking about freedom work, and innovations in the field of Black Studies.

Today’s conversation is with Jared Ball, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Morgan State University. He is the author of a number of scholarly and public facing essays as well as the book The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (2023). He also hosts the series I Mix What I Like!, which conducts critical conversations on key issues in African American and African diasporic life. In this podcasted discussion, we explore the politics of Black Studies, the past and future of the study of Black life, and what kinds of commitments hold the best promise for the future of the field.

Today's discussion is with the curator and participating artists in the Slavery in Motion collection (see video of event here), a multimedia collection produced as part of Remains // An Archive, a group gathered under the Diaspora Solidarities Lab. Slavery in Motion was on view through January 8, 2025 at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, SC. It was inspired by the life of Molia, a young African woman who was sold and lived as a captive in mid-18th century Westmoreland, Jamaica. Molia and other enslaved women and girls in Jamaica are the focus of Remains lab member Jessica Newby’s dissertation research. The four original artworks in the exhibition are by Black women artists from across the diaspora, Romaine McNeil (Kingston, Jamaica), Tatiana Esh (Brooklyn, NY), Sha-Shonna Rogers (Baltimore, MD), and Julia Mallory (Harrisburg, PA), and each convey an aspect of Molia’s life through a variety of visual, poetic, and sonic mediums.

Today’s conversation is with Gabrielle Williams, who teaches in the Department of Literary Studies at the New School for Social Research. She is a dancer and jazz vocalist whose scholarly work explores the question of hunger in Africana literature, a question that guides her book manuscript tentatively titled Starving from Satiety. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between embodiment, expressive culture, and Black Studies and how the study of Black life shifts and grounds the meaning of education and the imagination of the classroom.

Today's conversation is with Shingi Mavima, who teaches in the Department of History at University of Toledo. He is a specialist in the history and culture of Southern Africa, with particular focus on literature and popular culture. To this end, he has published on African hip hop, the relation of literature to questions of history and memory, and early nationalist literature in colonial Rhodesia. In this conversation, we discuss how Black Studies shapes the study of Africa, how the field facilitates trans-disciplinary and trans-geographic intellectual discussion, and generational shifts in the meaning of Black study.

Today’s conversation is with Khalil Saucier, who teaches in the Department of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Along with a number of scholarly articles and short pieces, he is the author of Necessarily Black: Cape Verdean Youth, Hip Hop Culture, and a Critique of Identity (2015), co-author of African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism (2024), and has done editorial work producing important volumes including most recently A Luta Continua: Reintroducing Amilcar Cabral to a New Generation of Thinkers (2016), Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation Theory (2016), and The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (2021). In this conversation, we discuss transnational study and the Black Studies imagination, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the transformation of disciplines when put in contact with Black Studies sensibilities.

Today’s conversation is with Chevy Eugene, who teaches in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In addition to a number of scholarly publications on Caribbean thought and the issue of reparations, he has co-edited a book Public Policy Formulation in Post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean from Palgrave (2025) and has done national and international advocacy and activist work on reparations for slavery in the Caribbean. Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between justice work and Black study, the relationship between Black Studies and community struggle, and the impact of Black ways of knowing on the Black Studies classroom.

Today's conversation is with Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who teaches in Black Studies at University of Rochester where he is the founding Chair of the department. He is the author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (2014) and co-editor of  Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (2019). In this episode, we discuss Black Studies, gender, sexuality, and the politics of thinking and doing Black study in the current political moment.

Today’s conversation is with Layla Brown, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Along with scholarly and popular venue essays and critical articles, she was the co-host with Charisse Burden-Stelly of The Last Dope Intellectual podcast and is currently working with Burden-Stelly on a video podcasted series with Black Liberation Media. In this conversation, we discuss the differences between and intersections of transnational study and pan-Africanism, anthropological research in a Black Studies context, and the relationship between the production of ideas and the work of liberation struggle. 

Today's conversation is with Nwando Achebe, who teaches in the Department of History at Michigan State University where she serves as Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History and also works as Associate Dean for Access, Faculty Development, and Strategic Implementation in the College of Social Science. Her work is wide-ranging and across media, having been extensively featured in radio and television documentaries, popular print media, and scholarly journals. Achebe's written work includes the groundbreaking books Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 and The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, the co-authored History of West Africa E-Course Book, edited collections including  A Companion to African History and Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective. In this episode, we discuss the place of the study of Africa in Black Studies, the importance of gender in the study of Africa and the Black Atlantic, and how oral testimony and knowledge production transforms the study of history.

Today’s conversation is with Sarah Jane Cervenak, who teaches in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (2014) and Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (2022). With J. Kameron Carter, she is co-editor of the series Black Outdoors on Duke University Press. Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between performance studies and Black Studies, the meaning of Black study in the classroom, and the place of expressive culture in the field.

Today's conversation is with Sonja Lanehart, who teaches in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona where her scholarship focuses on sociolinguistics and language variation, language and education in African American communities, language and identity, and African American education from Black Feminist, Intersectionality, and Critical Race Theory perspectives. In addition to a number of important articles on African American linguistic practices, she is the author and editor of a number of books including Sista, Speak!: Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy, Language in African American Communities, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. In this conversation, we discuss the horizons of linguistic research in a Black Studies frame, the place of gender and sexuality in understanding African American linguistic practices, and how to think about teaching in politically fraught times.

Today’s conversation is with Walter Greason, who teaches in the Department of History at Macalester College. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing publications, projects such as The Racial Violence Syllabus, The T. Thomas Fortune Center, and The Wakanda Syllabus, he is the author of a number of groundbreaking works, including The Path to Freedom: Black Families in New Jersey (2010), Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (2012), and most recently, in collaboration with Tim Fielder, The Graphic History of Hip Hop (2024). Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between historical research and Black Studies work, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the intersections of teaching, writing, and direct action aimed at racial justice.

Today’s conversation is with Saida Grundy, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology at Boston University. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing publications, she is the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (2022). Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between sociological research and Black Studies work, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the complex intersection of movement work and research.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies. In addition to many academic and public facing essays, he is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020). He is the producer for Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009), an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and the short video series The Bigger Picture (2022) for PBS Digital Studios.

Today’s conversation is with Reighan Gillam, who teaches in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth University. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she has published Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (2022) and is completing a book project titled Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism in Brazil. As well, she is the host of a podcast series on the New Books Network that was recently honored for its public facing scholarship work by the American Anthropological Association. In this conversation, we discuss the place of anthropological methods and sensibilities in the field of Black Studies, the cultural importance of transnational exchange, and the place of Brazil and related Latin American sites in the Black Studies imagination.

Today's conversation is between me and John E. Drabinski, my department colleague in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Maryland. As co-hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, we wanted to close out the first calendar year of the project with a reflection on the series thus far, sharing our key takeaways and the insights we've gained through the first seventy discussions of the past and future of the field. In this conversation, we discuss what for us has been both expected and unexpected in the project, what new horizons podcast episodes have opened up for us, and what new critical questions are guiding our evolving portraits of the field.

Today’s conversation is with Ed Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia, where he also holds an affiliation with the faculty of Creative Writing. In addition to a series of scholarly and popular essays, he is the author of a number of books and poetry collections, including most recently Call it in the Air (2022), Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes (2021), and is currently composing an intellectual biography of James Baldwin rooted in newly discovered archival materials. In this conversation, we discuss the relation between music and literature in the Black Studies tradition, the place of community in the formal and everyday practice of Black study, and importance of conversation, critical work, and creative expression.

Today's conversation is with Ozay Moore, an Emcee, DJ, Muralist, and community organizer who is the Executive Director of All of the Above Hip Hop Academy in Lansing, Michigan. In this discussion, we explore the cultural and historical significance of hip hop, the relationship between expressive culture and the politics of place, and the profound contribution of hip hop culture to how we might understand pedagogy and social transformation.

Today’s conversation is with Reiland Rabaka, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is the founder and director of the Center for African and African American Studies. He is the author of a number of important books in the Black Atlantic intellectual tradition, including Du Bois’ Dialectics (2009), Africana Critical Theory (2010), Forms of Fanonism (2011), and most recently Black Women’s Liberation Music (2023) and The Funk Movement (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the place of musical performance in the formation of Black intellectual life, the expansive nature of Black Studies as a political and liberatory movement, and the importance of thinking in the present even as we reckon with the past and imagine a future.