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 Laurian Bowles, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Davidson College. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (2025), which follows women head porters in Ghana to examine how women navigate precarity with creativity and care, offering a fresh analytic on racial capitalism, sexual autonomy and urban futurity in Africa. In this conversation, we explore the impact of Black Studies on ethnographic practices, Black study in a digital age, and the critical tension between Black Studies practices and institutions of higher education.

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 Amanda Boston, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Black Studies approaches to urban studies, questions of neoliberalism and economics, and the impact of structural racism on housing in historically Black communities.She is completing her first book on gentrification’s racial operations and the making and unmaking of Black communities in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and she has published related works in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes in sociology and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches to the study of Black urban life, the relationship between social scientific methodologies and the traditions of Black Studies, and the impact of Black Studies research on Black communities and struggles for racial justice.

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 Skye Jackson, a New Orleans-based writer and poet who teaches at Xavier University in New Orleans. She is a poet and critic whose work explores the complex and various forms of Black life, from the social life of violence to the intimate life of embodiment and familial and romantic relationships. Along with a number of poems in journals and edited collections, she is the co-author with Santos Calavera of a faster grave (2019) and author of the collection Libre (2025). In this conversation, we explore the place of poetry in articulating the meaning of Black life, the past and future possibilities of the poetic word, and how reading, study, and contemplation settle inside creative work.

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 Michele Prettyman, who teaches in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her work engages across creative and analytical practices in order to examine the complexity of storytelling and African American life. Along with scholarly articles and work on cinema, she is an editorial board member at liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies and is co-founder of Daughters of Eve Media. She was also featured in the documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking. In this conversation, we discuss the place of media studies in the examination of Black life, how Black Studies sensibilities shape theory and practice, and the relationship between creative work and community.

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 Andrea J. Queeley, who teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles in key journals and collections, she is the author of Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba (2015) and co-editor with Devyn Benson and Yesenia Fernández Selier of Gloria Rolando: Memory, Liberation, and the African Diaspora Through Cuban Film (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of Caribbean history and thinking for Black Studies, the place of cinematic work in knowledge production, and how anthropological methods expand the work of Black study.

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 Ronald Angelo Johnson, Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. His latest book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, published in 2025 by Cornell University Press, is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution, which brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. Entangled Alliances has received the Texas Institute of Letters Honor Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Johnson is currently working on the book We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press), a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. His first book was Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance, and he is the co-editor (with Ousmane Power-Greene) of the book In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Johnson serves as Steward of the Ella Wall Prichard Fund for Early Black Baptist History (EBBH) at Baylor University, which supports the study, research, and documentation of Black Baptist life and thought in North America up to 1866.

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 Bettina Judd, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. She is a poet and critic whose research explores Black feminist methods and sensibilities. Along with a number of scholarly articles and published poems, including the collection Patient (2014), she is the author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (2023). In this conversation, we explore the origins of Black ways of knowing and knowledge production, the importance of cultural study for Black Studies, and the place of creative work in the field.

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 Christel Temple, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Africana cultural memory studies, Pan-Africanism, the intersection of History and Literature, comparative Black literature, and Afroeuropean Studies. Along with numerous scholarly articles, including —"A Value Added Module for Introduction to Black Studies: Speaking in the Disciplines and Africana Market Value," in Afrocentric Innovations in Higher Education, she is the author of Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism (2005), Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise (2017), Black Cultural Mythology (2020), and co-editor with James L. Conyers, Jr. of Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory (2022). In this conversation, we discuss the distinctiveness of Black Studies methods and disciplinary work, the transformative work of Black study in the classroom, and how Black Studies works both inside and outside traditional disciplines and areas of study.