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 Errol Henderson, an Independent Scholar who previously served as an associate professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He earned a PhD in Political Science at University of Michigan with a concentration in World Politics after graduating magna cum laude from Wayne State University. He was the first—and for nearly 20 years—the only tenured African American professor in the Political Science Department at Penn State University. He has authored more than 50 scholarly publications including 5 books; and has an international reputation as a scholar of war. He helped lead the UCAR/BAMIII student protest in 1986-7; and the eleven-day “Study-In” building occupation at Wayne State in 1989. He is working on two books: (1) on the role of white supremacism in world politics; and (2) on black women and the Urban Peace and Justice Movement of the 1980s-90s.