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 Angela Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard-Columbia. She studies the political economy of suburban Black middle-class suburbs, and her forthcoming book Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage, February 2026) asks why majority-Black suburbs that work hard to build stable, thriving communities still face financial barriers that make this harder than it is for their white counterparts.

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 Robert Bland, who teaches in the Departments of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. My research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory.

His latest book - Requieum for Reconstruction Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation - examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. It explores the efforts of black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed Compromise of 1877. In doing so, he illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, local schools, and representations of Gullah folklore and the simultaneous debate in the national black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order.

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 Kimberly Thomas McNair, who teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She teaches widely in literature, gender studies, and cultural studies inside the Black Studies tradition and is completing a book manuscript entitled Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: T-Shirt Culture and the Black Activist Tradition.In this conversation, we discuss the unique character of Black Studies, relations of disciplines to the non-disciplinary character of the field, and the intersection of politics, memory, and cultural studies in the history of Black social activism.

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 Dr. Ronald Zeigler, former director of Nyumburu Cultural Center for 25 years; colleague who worked as adjuncted in the African American and Africana Studies Department integral part of the Black community on campus for 47 years.

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 Deborah Gray White, an emeritus Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is author of Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994; several K-12 textbooks on United States History, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860. In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of black women into the modern historical profession and the development of the field of black women’s history. Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored college text, is in its third edition.

As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C, and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March. She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history, and in 2019 was awarded the Stephen A. Ambrose Oral History Award. From 2016-2021 she co-directed the “Scarlet and Black Project” which investigated Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University and is co-editor of the three-part Scarlet and Black series that explores this history. In 2024, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History awarded her its Living Legacy Award for her work in establishing the field of African American women’s history. She is currently at work on an autobiography, tentatively titled “Winning Against Ugly: A Black Historian’s Tale of Love, Loss, and the Historical Profession.”

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 Paul C. Taylor, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on philosophy and the question of race, he is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2003), On Obama (2015), and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is currently at work on two book-length projects: Dark Futures and Uneasy Sanctuary: Rethinking Race-Thinking.In this conversation, we discuss the place of philosophical thinking in the study of Black life, critical theory as a form of Black study, and the intersection of aesthetic questions and critical theories of race in the field of Black Studies.

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 Davis-McElligatt, who teaches in the Department of English at University of North Texas. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on literature and graphic arts, she is the author of the forthcoming Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora (2026).In this conversation, we discuss the place of the Black literary tradition in the study of Black life, disciplinary limits and possibilities, and how comics, graphic arts, and aesthetic questions they raise expand the Black Studies 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 Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009) Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990, 2nd ed. 2015); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002, New Ed. 2020); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (Free Press 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); and forthcoming Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt, 2026). He also co-edited (with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor), Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies (2023); (with Jesse Benjamin), Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (2018); (with Stephen Tuck) The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (2015); (with Franklin Rosemont) Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (2009); (with Earl Lewis) To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (2000); and (with Sidney J. Lemelle), Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1995). Kelley’s articles and essays have appeared in dozens of several anthologies, journals, and magazines, including Hammer and Hope; American Quarterly; African Studies Review; Journal of American History; New Labor Forum; The Nation; New York Times; New York Review of Books; Radical History Review; Transition; Black Scholar; Dissent; Rethinking Marxism; Black Music Research Journal; Callaloo; Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir; and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.