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 Joanna Cardenas, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the nexus of critical carceral studies, disability studies, and Black feminist thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, gender, and space. Through a close spatial analysis of California prisons, her research focuses on how systems of confinement inform understandings of gender, race, and ableism. She also studies how the carceral state of South Central Los Angeles impacts Black and Latinx women, with a focus on surveillance and other policing practices. With a deep engagement in community-based research, she also helps interrogate the experimentation of new surveillance and policing technologies in Skid Row, the Figueroa corridor, and Los Angeles more broadly. Joanna’s research has been supported by the Greater Good Science Center, the Black Studies Collaboratory, the Center for Race and Gender, Berkeley Law, and Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program. Beyond academia, Joanna is also actively involved in litigation challenging staff misconduct across California state prisons. In this conversation, we discuss the place of carceral studies in the study of Black life, how urban studies and questions of gender impact Black Studies inquiry, and how community work expands the classroom and intellectual life.

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 Justin Leroy, who teaches in the Department of History at Duke University. He specializes in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular interests in intellectual history, slavery, abolition, and the history of capitalism. His first book, The Lowest Freedom, recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that located the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. His current research focuses on carceral studies, and he is working on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. He also has longstanding interests in comparative Black/Indigenous and Black/Asian American histories.

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 Kaiama L. Glover, professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life" (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton) and a series of essays, “‘Blackness’ in French.” Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction. She is also the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. Professor Glover's scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

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 Imani Perry, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. She has published extensively in popular and scholarly venues and is the author of eight books: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004) More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018), Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (2018), Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019), South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022), and Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). Perry was named MacArthur Fellow in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the contours of Black study, the expansiveness of the Black Studies imagination, and the place of gender and cultural studies in the field.

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 Kinitra Brooks, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture as seen in her weekly column for The Root, “The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country” and her multiple visits as a commentator on NPR’s 1A. She has co-edited The Lemonade Reader (Routledge 2019), an interdisciplinary collection that explores the nuances of Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade. She has recently co-edited The Renaissance Reader (Routledge 2025), which is also based on a Beyoncé project. Her two other books are Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women.

Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman throughout history and in contemporary popular culture as seen in her forthcoming graphic novel, Red Dirt Witch (Abrams Books 2026). Dr. Brooks recently served as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University during the 2018-2019 academic year. Dr. Brooks also served as the Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School for the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Brooks’ current book project, Divine Conjurers: Rootwork, Resistance, and Revolution explores the unique relationship between Black women’s political subversion and Black women’s spirit work.

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 andré carrington, who teaches in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. He has published extensively on literature and the speculative arts and is the author of two books, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016) and Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (2026), as well as editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of the Black Studies imagination, the place of popular and graphic arts in Black study, and the terms of thinking and teaching Black life in times of political crisis.

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 Kyra Gaunt, who teaches in the Department of Music and Theater at State University of New York, Albany. She has published extensively on race and gender in both academic and popular venues, and is the author of the groundbreaking work The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop (2007). In this conversation, we explore the significance of musical study in the field of Black Studies, the relationship between vernacular cultural practices and world- and idea-making, and how a focus on the experiences of Black girls and women shifts our understanding of the meaning of Black study.

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 LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, who teaches in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she also serves as Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. Her work is invested in history, spirituality, and memory, with a particular focus on African American women and religion. To that end, she is the author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (2014) and has edited two books, Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, with Carol B. Duncan and Tamura A. Lomax (2014) and Fat Religion: Protestant Christianity and the Construction of the Fat Body, with Lynne Gerber and Susan Hill (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of historical and religious study in Black Studies, spiritual practice as Black study, and how questions of gender and region transform our approach to the field.