The Black Studies Podcast

Ashley Newby and John E. Drabinski

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. 1d ago

    Zandria F. Robinson - Department of Black Studies, Georgetown 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 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.

    Zandria F. Robinson - Department of Black Studies, Georgetown University

  2. 3d ago

    Cisco Bradley - Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

    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 Cisco Bradley, who teaches in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. He an award-winning author, film director, and screenwriter. He is a scholar of the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the African diaspora as well as a cultural theorist and historical ethnographer. Since 2011, his work has focused on music and migration, particularly as it has manifested in the United States. His current research focuses on tracing the oral transmission of African music in North America and the Caribbean from the 16th century to the present. His work has been widely reviewed in scholarly journals, the LA Review of Books, The Wire, and other publications. He has been awarded the Digital Studies Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, a literary grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and a dissertation fellowship from the Fulbright Program. He is the director of the Music and Migration Lab at the Pratt Institute. The lab is composed of an international team of researchers who work at the intersection between migration/mobility studies and music studies. Together with partners at New York University, Rutgers University, City University of New York, University of Geneva, University of Birmingham, University of Sydney, Griffith University, independent scholars, and musicians, the lab collects and preserves oral histories and leads mapping projects related to national and global cultural movements. The lab has recorded over 500 oral history interviews with more ongoing. Some of the interviews appear on Jazz Right Now which Prof. Bradley founded in 2013.

    Cisco Bradley - Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

  3. 5d ago

    Courtney Patterson-Faye - Department of Sociology, Wesleyan 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 Courtney Patterson-Faye, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Wesleyan University. In addition to essays on Black feminist theory, fat studies, and sexuality and cultural studies, she is the author of The Body Contract: Black Women, Culture, and the Impossibilities of Fatness, forthcoming on NYU Press. In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of Black study, the relevance of Black Fat Studies for the field, and how Black Studies makes critical interventions inside disciplines.

    Courtney Patterson-Faye - Department of Sociology, Wesleyan University

  4. Jul 31

    Nikki L. Brown - Departments of History and of African American and Africana Studies, University of Kentucky

    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 Nikki L. Brown who teaches in the Departments of History and of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.  She works on race, representation, and African American history of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Brown is working on several projects currently: a manuscript on the photographs of the Louisiana’s civil rights movement; two digital archives, Documenting Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1880 to 1950, and Cataloguing Jim Crow in Kentucky; and a translation of the memoir of Afro-Turkish political leader Mustafa Olpak in conjunction with online oral history project of the Afro-Turks. The last project on the Afro Turks won a summer stipend grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities.

    Nikki L. Brown - Departments of History and of African American and Africana Studies, University of Kentucky

  5. Jul 29

    Karen Kossie-Chernyshev - Department of History, Texas Southern 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 Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, who teaches in the Department of History at Texas Southern University She is a fifth-generation Texan and the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in the field of history from a Texas institution (Rice University). Her research focuses on African American women’s intellectual history, African American religion, and topics in the African Diaspora.  Her edited works include Recovering Five Generations Hence:  The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace (Texas A&M University Press, 2013) and Angie Brown (Outskirts Press, 2017). Kossie-Chernyshev is the founding director of SWATH, an interdisciplinary summer workshop on African American Texas History for local K-16 teachers, works on the board of the Harris County historical commission, is founder of the Lillian B Horace symposium, serves as executive director of USLEEP America, and just celebrated her 50th year as a church musician.

    Karen Kossie-Chernyshev - Department of History, Texas Southern University

  6. Jul 27

    Leigh Raiford - Department of African American 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 Leigh Raiford, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to a number of critical essays in edited collections and journals, she is co-editor of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017) and the author of both Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013) and When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the political and cultural origins of the field, the place of art in the history of Black study, and the analytical and imaginative dimensions of Black Studies.

    Leigh Raiford - Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley

  7. Jul 24

    Mark Campbell - Department of Arts, Culture, and Media, University of Toronto, Scarborough

    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 Mark Campbell, who teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at University of Toronto, Scarborough. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations, hip-hop archives and notions of the human. Dr. Campbell is currently the Principal Investigator in the SSHRC funded research project, Black  Sonic Knowledges: Amplifying Black Canadian Musical Legacies and founder at Northside Hip-Hop Archive. He leads The Afrosonic Innovation Lab, a team of artists, creatives, and scholars actively engaged in sound experimentation, music-making and musicological analysis across the African diaspora. His recent books include the monograph AfroSonic Life (2022), the co-edited collection of essays, We Still Here: Hip Hop in North of the 49th Parallel published (in 2020) and the co-edited collection Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production with Murray Forman (in 2023).

    Mark Campbell - Department of Arts, Culture, and Media, University of Toronto, Scarborough

  8. Jul 22

    Nicosia Shakes - Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced

    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 Nicosia Shakes, who teaches in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Merced. In addition to essays in edited collections and journals such as Cultural Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Black Scholar, the CLR James Journal, SX Salon, she is the author of Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space (2023), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as an activist discipline, the importance of transnational, comparative work, and the demands of multidisciplinary research and study.

    Nicosia Shakes - Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced
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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
    299
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © @TheBlackStudiesPodcast

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