Along with dozens of scholarly articles and a handful of edited books and journal issues, he is the author of seven books: Sensibility and Singularity (2001), Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008), Levinas and the Postcolonial (2012), Glissant and the Middle Passage (2019), and three recent books that are the occasion for our conversation, Atlantic Theory (2025), So Unimaginable a Price (2026) and At the Margins of Nihilism (2026). He is also the co-editor with Michael Sawyer of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and co-host of both The Black Studies Podcast and Conversations in Atlantic Theory.

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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 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).

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 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.