This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Corey D.B. Walker, who is Dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University where he is also Inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. His work is ambitious with focus on key figures in the African American intellectual tradition, political and cultural moments of liberation struggle, and the meaning of religious traditions in Black American history. Along with numerous scholarly articles and edited volumes, he is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (2008) and is completing a book-length manuscript entitled Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy. At Wake Forest University, he is also the Principle Investigator for the Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative. In this conversation, we discuss the complex political and cultural origins of the field of Black Studies, the place of religious study in the field, and how future work in Black Studies might address existential questions of environmental degradation, racism, the future of the planet.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Sharon Harley, who teaches in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on Black women's labor history and racial and gender politics. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited and contributed essays in the pioneer anthology, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978). She has edited and contributed to two anthologies Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers, 2002) and Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (Rutgers, 2008), resulting from two major Ford Foundation grants. She recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and "I Don't Pay Those Borders No Mind At All:” Audley E. Moore (“Queen “Mother Moore) – Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist: Reframing Black Nationalist/Pan-Africanist Engagement” in Women and Migrations (2018). In this conversation, we discuss her journey into Black Studies, the importance of telling Black women's history in relation to public but also underground economies, and the expansive future of the field.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Paul Joseph López Oro, who teaches in and is the director of the Program in Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. His work focuses on the history, identity, and complex epistemologies of Black Latinx communities and cultures, with specific attention to Garifuna histories in the hemisphere, which is the focus of his forthcoming book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York. In this conversation, we discuss the place of Latin America broadly and Central America in particular in the Black Studies imagination, the promise of thinking without imaginary and political borders, and the transformative work of Black queer studies in the history and future of the field.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Theodore Foster III, who teaches in the Department of History, Geography, and Philosophy at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His research works at the intersection of history and political memory, with special attention to how we remember and reactivate the civil rights movement and other Black freedom struggles. In this conversation, we discuss the place of historical work for political mobilization, the complexity of blackness as an identity in the Black Studies tradition, and the importance of creating spaces of Black memory and of Black study.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 M. Shadee Malaklou, who is Chair of and teaches in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Berea College where she is also Inaugural Founder and Director of The bell hooks Center. Her work focuses on variations on afropessimism, from the expansiveness of its vision to important critical interventions against its nihilism. In this conversation, we discuss the cultural and political meaning of pessimism, the foundations of the field of Black Studies in nihilism and resistance to it, and the transformative role of gender and sexuality studies for the field.