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 Fanon Che Wilkins, who teaches in the Department of History at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. His teaching and research work focuses on the history of Black radicalism across the Atlantic world, with particular focus on pan-African thought, congresses, and mobilizations in the mid- and later-twentieth century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational solidarity, the complexity of radical politics in Black Studies, and the transformative work of historical research and writing for political and cultural action.

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 Johanna Faith Almiron, a longtime educator, organizer, and scholar currently based in Nyack, New York, and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Her award-winning scholarship on the visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has been featured nationally and internationally at major museums and galleries,including the Guggenheim, theMuseum of Fine Arts Boston, the Nahmad Gallery, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. She has penned groundbreaking cultural criticism and essays in LitHub, ArtNews, Public Seminar, LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Rizzoli Press with recognition from the New York Times’ Shortlist, and Vanity Fair. She has taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Cooper Union School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between black studies and ethnic studies, the role of performance and movement in relation to identity and coalition building, and the philosophies and politics of black artists and creatives who’ve guided and influenced the political-intellectual journey of Dr. Almiron

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 discussion is with Bonnie Thornton Dill, Dean and Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland. Shel was appointed Dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities in 2011, having joined the university in 1991 as Professor and served as Chair of the Women’s Studies department for eight years. A pioneering scholar on the intersections of race, class and gender in the U.S. with an emphasis on African-American women, work and families, she is founding director of both the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at UMD. Her scholarship includes three books and numerous articles.

She is former president of the National Women’s Studies Association; former vice president of the American Sociological Association; and former chair of the Committee of Scholars for Ms. magazine.

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 Eola Dance and Jennie K. Williams, co-founders and directors of the Kinfolkology project, which explores the complex intersection of data, memory, and descendent communities in the history of enslavement. Eola Dance is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Howard University and Jennie K. Williams is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of data for history, how memory of the enslaved is both inside and outside data, and what obligations curators of slavery’s data have to descendent communities.

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 André Brock, Jr., who teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. His scholarly work includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, Black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter in his book Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020). His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.

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 Stephanie Shonekan, who is Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at University of Maryland, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African American and Africana Studies. She is the author of a number of critical essays on music and the Black Studies tradition, with particular focus on the relationship between expressive culture and identity, and is the author of Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (2015), Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s Sorrow Tears and Blood (2025), and Race and the American Story, co-authored with Adam Seagrave in 2024. In this conversation, we discuss the place of musicological research in the field, the importance of transnational studies, and the challenges for Black Studies in higher-ed’s contemporary cultural and political moment.

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 Kojo Damptey, a musician and scholar who is completing doctoral studies in the School of Social Work at McMaster University. His musical work engages with trans-Atlantic sound connections and political meaning, which draws from his academic research in Afrocentrism, indigenous African systems of knowledge, and decolonial theoretical frameworks. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between study and musical practice, the political meaning of sound, and the significance of art for cultural and social liberation work.

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 Corey D.B. Walker, who is Dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University where he is also Inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. His work is ambitious with focus on key figures in the African American intellectual tradition, political and cultural moments of liberation struggle, and the meaning of religious traditions in Black American history. Along with numerous scholarly articles and edited volumes, he is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (2008) and is completing a book-length manuscript entitled Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy. At Wake Forest University, he is also the Principle Investigator for the Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative. In this conversation, we discuss the complex political and cultural origins of the field of Black Studies, the place of religious study in the field, and how future work in Black Studies might address existential questions of environmental degradation, racism, the future of the planet.