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 between me and John E. Drabinski, my department colleague in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Maryland. As co-hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, we wanted to close out the first calendar year of the project with a reflection on the series thus far, sharing our key takeaways and the insights we've gained through the first seventy discussions of the past and future of the field. In this conversation, we discuss what for us has been both expected and unexpected in the project, what new horizons podcast episodes have opened up for us, and what new critical questions are guiding our evolving portraits of the field.

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 Ed Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia, where he also holds an affiliation with the faculty of Creative Writing. In addition to a series of scholarly and popular essays, he is the author of a number of books and poetry collections, including most recently Call it in the Air (2022), Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes (2021), and is currently composing an intellectual biography of James Baldwin rooted in newly discovered archival materials. In this conversation, we discuss the relation between music and literature in the Black Studies tradition, the place of community in the formal and everyday practice of Black study, and importance of conversation, critical work, and creative expression.

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 Ozay Moore, an Emcee, DJ, Muralist, and community organizer who is the Executive Director of All of the Above Hip Hop Academy in Lansing, Michigan. In this discussion, we explore the cultural and historical significance of hip hop, the relationship between expressive culture and the politics of place, and the profound contribution of hip hop culture to how we might understand pedagogy and social transformation.

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 Reiland Rabaka, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is the founder and director of the Center for African and African American Studies. He is the author of a number of important books in the Black Atlantic intellectual tradition, including Du Bois’ Dialectics (2009), Africana Critical Theory (2010), Forms of Fanonism (2011), and most recently Black Women’s Liberation Music (2023) and The Funk Movement (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the place of musical performance in the formation of Black intellectual life, the expansive nature of Black Studies as a political and liberatory movement, and the importance of thinking in the present even as we reckon with the past and imagine a future.

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 episode features Gerald Horne, who teaches in the Department of History at University of Houston. He has written many scholarly and popular essays on history, race, and politics, and is the author over thirty books including most recently Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1900-2000 (2023) and The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism (2022), as well as the recently published I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the process of rewriting history from the perspective of African Americans, the impact of that writing on the field of Black Studies, and importance of transnational solidarities for Black liberation struggle.

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 Zalika U. Ibaorimi, who works under the artist name N0HumanInv0lved (N.H.I.) and teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. Her work engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes in order to trace the Human sexual geographies in the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Additionally, they consider the discursiveness of critical Humanism as a way to chart the figuration of the Black wh0re vis-à-vis the counter- and anti-Human. In this conversation, we discuss the work of undisciplining the field of Black studies, how critical theory and art practice converge to open new horizons in the field, and the significance of breaking with normative notions of taste in thinking about Black life.

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 Sparling Williams, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial practice is predicated on interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching on American art, and foregrounds Black Feminist space-making. She is the author of Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O'Grady and the Art of Language from 2021 and Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, forthcoming in 2025. Her scholarly work is invested in the space of the museum, with a focus on African American art and culture, and the work of U.S.-based artists of color, as well as material histories, cross cultural exchange, strategies of address, and contemporary art that engages with the history of the United States. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative work of Black study and Black Studies, the museum as community and political space, and the place of beauty and joy in thinking about Black life.

(Photo credit: Hector René Membreño-Canales)

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 Aisha Durham, Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life in the "post" era using auto/ethnography, performance writing, and Black feminist intersectional approaches refined in hip hop feminism. She engages these methods in her two edited books and NCA award-winning monograph Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. She has edited journal special issues about local Florida and transnational culture and her research has been featured in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, the Journal of Autoethnography, and Communication, Culture, and Critique. Durham is a former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Fellow (Brazil), The National Museum of African American History and Culture advisory board member for their hip hop anthology, and an Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography and Personal Narrative Research award recipient. She has also written public scholarship for news and entertainment outlets, such as Tampa Bay Times, NPR, and Haaretz.