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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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..

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.