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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.