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 Marion Orr, the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He previously was a member of the political science faculty at Duke University. Professor Orr earned his B.A. degree in political science from Savannah State College, M.A. in political science from Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University), and a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park. From 2008-2014, Professor Orr served as Director of the Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. He is a former chair of Brown's Department of Political Science and a former director of Brown's Urban Studies Program. Professor Orr's expertise is in the area of American politics. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics. He is the author and editor of eight books. His book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs, Jr. (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), is the first biography of Michigan's first Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Among Professor Orr's other books, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore (University Press of Kansas), won the Policy Studies Organization's Aaron Wildavsky Award and his co-authored, The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton University Press), was named the best book by the American Political Science Association's (APSA) Urban Politics Section. He is the coeditor (with Domingo Morel) of Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles, essays, and reviews.

In 2019, Professor Orr was awarded the APSA's Hanes Walton, Jr. Career Award that honors a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics. Professor Orr is the recipient of Biographers International Organization Francis "Frank" Rollin Fellowship. He has also held a research fellowship at the Brookings Institution, a Presidential Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Professor Orr served as President of the APSA's Organized Section on Urban Politics and as Chair of the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association (UAA), an international organization devoted to the study of urban issues. Dr. Orr has also served as a member of the executive councils of the American Political Science Association and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He has served, or is currently serving, on the editorial boards of the National Political Science Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, and Urban Affairs Review.

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 Irvin Hunt, who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at University of Illinois. He is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, which won Honorable Mention in the William Scarborough Sanders Prize competition in 2023, and he is at work on two books, a study of contemporary Black poetry titled A New Language for Grief and another titled I Can't Make You Speak: Stories. He is also co-writer of the script for Khalil Joseph's film BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. In this conversation, we discuss the critical Black literary tradition, horizons of expressive culture, and the politics of thinking and doing Black Studies in the contemporary moment.

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 Jeanine Staples-Dixon, a Professor of Literacy and Language, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State's Colleges of Education and Liberal Arts. She also serves as Senior Faculty Mentor for the university, through the Office of Educational Equity. A long-time leader in Critical New Literacies Studies and teacher education, she's currently writing her two forthcoming books, Extraordinary Pedagogies: An Endarkened Feminist Approach To Revolutionizing Teacher Consciousness (Teachers College Press, 2024) and Extraordinary Literacies: Regarding the Literate Lives of Black Girls and Women In Schools & Society (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026). She teaches LLED 580, CI 590, and CI 501 for Penn State's World Campus. Her website is: https://jeaninestaples.com

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, 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 Allison A. Waite, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. She has worked on a number of films and has produced, written, and directed a number of pieces including The Dope Years, a documentary on the life and death of Latasha Harlins. In this conversation, we discuss the political significance of art as a facilitator of empathy, the importance of authenticity and voice in Black art making, and the responsibilities of creatives and writers in relation to community.

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 Joyce E. King, Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership and Professor of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education & Human Development at Georgia State University. Previously, King held senior academic affairs positions as Provost at Spelman College, Associate Provost at Medgar Evers College, CUNY and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Diversity Programs at the University of New Orleans. She was director of teacher education for twelve years at Santa Clara University and the first head of the Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College. She completed two prestigious leadership programs: the American Council on Education Fellowship at Stanford University with the President, the Vice President for Planning and Management, and the Office for Multicultural Development. As a W.K. Kellogg National Fellowship recipient, King also studied women’s leadership and grassroots participation in social change in China, Brazil, France, Kenya, Japan, Mali and Peru.

Widely respected in the fields of urban education and the sociology of education, King’s research has contributed to the knowledge-base on preparing teachers for diversity and curriculum theorizing through her scholarship, teaching practice and leadership. She served on the Curriculum Commission of the State Board of Education.

Recent publications include the Harvard Educational Review, The Handbook of Research on Black Education, The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education and Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black Pioneers. In addition, King organized and edited a landmark book, Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century that was published for the American Educational Research Association (2005).

She has served as co-editor of the top-ranked Review of Educational Research, and her concept of “dysconscious racism” continues to influence research and practice in education and sociology as well in the U.S. and in other countries. A forthcoming book produced in collaboration with teacher educators and classroom teachers is: “Re-membering” History in Student and Teacher Learning: An Afrocentric and Culturally Informed Praxis.

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 a collaboration between the podcast’s editorial collective: Brie Gorrell, Olivia Blucker, John Drabinski, and Ashley Newby.In this conversation, we discuss the experience of recording two hundred conversations, how it has impacted our thinking about the field of Black Studies, what those conversations say about the past and future of the field, and what sort of new questions have been opened up for us across The Black Studies Podcast.

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, 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 Jaz Riley, Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing challenge of community for Black Studies research, the critical intervention made by emerging questions of gender for the field, and the politics of Black study in the contemporary university.

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 Carole Boyce-Davies, Chair and Professor of African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2023 to present). She is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Humane Letters in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor Emerita of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University where she taught from 2007-2023. From the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was a popular award-winning professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. In 1997, she was recruited to build the African Diaspora Studies Program at Florida International University where she served three successful terms until 2007 when she joined the Cornell faculty. An African Diaspora and Black Feminist Studies scholar in scholarship and in practice, she is a popular speaker on several related topics. In 2015, she was appointed to the prestigious Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon which she deferred and was Visiting Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Beijing, China 2016.. In 2022, she was a visiting professor at the School of Foreign Languages (FLEX), University of Havana during which time she conducted interviews on women and leadership in Cuba, focusing largely on Havana.