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 Nicole Fleetwood, a writer, curator, and art critic who teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Along with numerous articles and critical pieces, she is the author of Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), curator of the traveling exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” the book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which won the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism, and most, recently, Between the River and Railroad Tracks, forthcoming in November 2026. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. In this conversation, we discuss writing about place, memoir and Black study, and the meaning of history and memory in Black life.

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 Bobby Smith, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Trained as a sociologist with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith’s research examines how Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food have shaped their lives and the world. He is the James Beard–nominated author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America. His other work has appeared in public and scholarly outlets including Time, The Conversation, Word In Black, and the Journal of Black Studies.

Bobby Smith earned a Ph.D. in development sociology and an M.S. in applied and agricultural economics from Cornell University, and a B.S. (summa cum laude) in agriculture – agricultural economics from Prairie View A&M University.

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 Natanya Duncan, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Queens College in New York City. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is author of the groundbreaking work An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss historical writing as Black study, the place of gender in African American and diasporic history, and the obligations and imperatives for Black Studies in the contemporary moment.