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 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.

This is Brie Gorrell 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.