The Black Studies Podcast

Ashley Newby and John E. Drabinski
  • 4.9 (68)
  • Education
  • Updated Weekly

The Black Studies Podcast is 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.

  1. 2d ago

    Natanya Duncan - Department of Africana Studies, Queens College

    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.

    Natanya Duncan - Department of Africana Studies, Queens College

  2. 4d ago

    Logan Shanks - Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley

    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.

    Logan Shanks - Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley

  3. 6d ago

    Charrise Barron - Department of Music, Harvard 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 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.

    Charrise Barron - Department of Music, Harvard University

  4. Oct 2

    Alessandra Raengo - School of Film, Media, and Theater, Georgia State 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 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.

    Alessandra Raengo - School of Film, Media, and Theater, Georgia State University

  5. Sep 30

    Alex Gil - Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University

    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.

    Alex Gil - Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University

  6. Sep 28

    Samantha Pinto - Department of English, University of Texas, Austin

    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.

    Samantha Pinto - Department of English, University of Texas, Austin

  7. Sep 25

    Zahra Caldwell - Department of Ethnic and Gender Studies, Westfield State University

    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 Zahra Caldwell, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic and Gender Studies Department at Westfield State University. She is an interdisciplinary cultural historian who teaches in the fields of History, Black Studies, and Women’s Studies. Her professional, community, and academic work is focused on unpacking and expanding the definition of resistance within the long struggle for African American freedom, particularly regarding African American women, artistic labor, and inventive activism. Her research includes African American women’s history, the cultural labor of African Americans and women, and twentieth-century Black radicalism. She has published work on Black cultural luminaries such as Hazel Scott, Prince, Elizabeth Catlett, and Beyoncé. She is the author of “The Fiercest Kind: Five Black Women in Art, Performance, and Resistance 1937-1965” (UMass Press, 2026), which looks at the contributions and challenges of Black women activist-artists in the mid 20th century.

    Zahra Caldwell - Department of Ethnic and Gender Studies, Westfield State University

  8. Sep 23

    Will Mosley - Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland

    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 Will Mosley, who teaches in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland.He has published widely in scholarly venues on Black feminism, cultural studies, and queer theory and is the author of the book Tenderness: The Work of Black Queer Expression, forthcoming with Duke University Press. In this conversation, we discuss Black study and pedagogy, how Black life expands expressive culture and fashions new critical tools, and the productive intersections of Black Studies and queer history.

    Will Mosley - Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland
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About

The Black Studies Podcast is 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.

Information

  • Creator
    Ashley Newby and John E. Drabinski
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    326
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © @TheBlackStudiesPodcast

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