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.

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 Logan Shanks, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Grounded in traditions of Black feminist theory and study, her work analyzes the afterlife of slavery in Black visual and sonic aesthetics in the South and how violence is made pleasurable in Black popular culture and performance in the Americas. In this conversation, we discuss diasporic sensibilities in study, popular culture as history and theory, and how vernacular life sits in the heart of the Black Studies tradition.

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 Charrise Barron, who teaches in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she is an affiliate in African and African American Studies and with the Harvard Data Science Initiative. A practicing gospel artist, she has written scholarly pieces and is the author of the forthcoming The Platinum Age of Gospel: The Years When Crossover Music Changed Everything (2026). In this conversation, we discuss sound and sonic culture, religion and the African American tradition, and the place of religious studies in the Black Studies 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 Alessandra Raengo, who teaches in the School of Film, Media, and Theater at Georgia State University. Along with many essays on Black cinema and aesthetics, she is the author of two books, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (2013) and Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (2016), as well as founding editor in chief of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. In this conversation, we discuss cinema and media work, the politics of art and culture, and the place of the aesthetic in the Black Studies tradition.

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 Alex Gil, who teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he conducts introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

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.