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 Ezinwanne ‘Ezi’ Odozor, Nigerian Canadian writer, higher education professional, and anti-racist practitioner, Njoki Wane, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto, and Janelle Brady, assistant professor in the School of Early Childhood studies at Toronto Metropolitan 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 Alix Chapman, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. His research and teaching interests include Black Queer Studies, Black Feminism, and anthropology and is the author of Raising the Bottom: Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between activism and intellectual life, sexuality and blackness, and the place of ethnographic methods in Black Studies.

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 Jonathan Howard, who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support fromthe Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be found at Callaloo, Souls, Atlantic Studies, and Transition Magazine. His first, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the water as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that the blackness which dawned in the oceanic encounter of Middle Passage is best apprehended not as social death but ecological life.

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 Meredith Gadsby, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Oberlin College. Along with essays on migration, literature, and identity, she is the author of Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival (2006) and co-editor of Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (2003). In this conversation, we discuss the politics of Black study inside and outside the academy, the complexity of thinking diaspora, and the place of literary work in Black Studies.

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.

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 widerange 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 between John E. Drabinski and Ashley Newby, both of whom teach in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Maryland, As co-founders and co-hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, our discussion in this episode reflects on the moment of the podcast’s 300th episode, guided by questions sent to us by podcast listeners over social media. We explore how work on the podcast has impacted our understanding of Black Studies, how the podcast has enhanced our teaching and pedagogy, what moments stand out for us across the 300 episodes, feedback we have received from colleagues and listeners, and what hopes we have for the future of the project.

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 Wendy M. Thompson, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at California State University, San Jose. She is a researcher in African American history and cultural studies and is a practicing poet whose debut collection Black California Gold was published in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the undisciplined character of Black Studies, the place of the creative voice in Black Studies writing, and the importance of writing from a sense of place.

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 Zandria F. Robinson, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a writer and ethnographer working on race, gender, sound, and spirit at the crossroads of the living and the dead. A native Memphian and classically trained violinist, Robinson earned the Bachelor of Arts in Literature and African American Studies and the Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Memphis and the Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from Northwestern University. Dr. Robinson’s first book, This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) won the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second monograph, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter (UCLA), won the 2018 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title and the Robert E. Park Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.