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 Samantha Pinto, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Texas, Austin. Along with many essays on African American literature and Black feminism, she is the co-editor with Alexandra S. Moore of Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies (2020) and with Jennifer C. Nash of The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (2023), and the author of three books: Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013), Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (2020), and Inside the Body of Black Feminism: Science, Race, Culture (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of cultural meaning, literary studies and expressive culture, and the enigma of program building in multi-disciplinary project of Black Studies.