This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's conversation is 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's conversation is with 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's episode features Gerald Horne, who teaches in the Department of History at University of Houston. He has written many scholarly and popular essays on history, race, and politics, and is the author over thirty books including most recently Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1900-2000 (2023) and The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism (2022), as well as the recently published I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the process of rewriting history from the perspective of African Americans, the impact of that writing on the field of Black Studies, and importance of transnational solidarities for Black liberation struggle.