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 Joyce E. King, Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership and Professor of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education & Human Development at Georgia State University. Previously, King held senior academic affairs positions as Provost at Spelman College, Associate Provost at Medgar Evers College, CUNY and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Diversity Programs at the University of New Orleans. She was director of teacher education for twelve years at Santa Clara University and the first head of the Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College. She completed two prestigious leadership programs: the American Council on Education Fellowship at Stanford University with the President, the Vice President for Planning and Management, and the Office for Multicultural Development. As a W.K. Kellogg National Fellowship recipient, King also studied women’s leadership and grassroots participation in social change in China, Brazil, France, Kenya, Japan, Mali and Peru.
Widely respected in the fields of urban education and the sociology of education, King’s research has contributed to the knowledge-base on preparing teachers for diversity and curriculum theorizing through her scholarship, teaching practice and leadership. She served on the Curriculum Commission of the State Board of Education.
Recent publications include the Harvard Educational Review, The Handbook of Research on Black Education, The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education and Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black Pioneers. In addition, King organized and edited a landmark book, Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century that was published for the American Educational Research Association (2005).
She has served as co-editor of the top-ranked Review of Educational Research, and her concept of “dysconscious racism” continues to influence research and practice in education and sociology as well in the U.S. and in other countries. A forthcoming book produced in collaboration with teacher educators and classroom teachers is: “Re-membering” History in Student and Teacher Learning: An Afrocentric and Culturally Informed Praxis.
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 a collaboration between the podcast’s editorial collective: Brie Gorrell, Olivia Blucker, John Drabinski, and Ashley Newby.In this conversation, we discuss the experience of recording two hundred conversations, how it has impacted our thinking about the field of Black Studies, what those conversations say about the past and future of the field, and what sort of new questions have been opened up for us across The Black Studies Podcast.
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, 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 Jaz Riley, Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing challenge of community for Black Studies research, the critical intervention made by emerging questions of gender for the field, and the politics of Black study in the contemporary university.
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 Carole Boyce-Davies, Chair and Professor of African Diaspora Literatures in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2023 to present). She is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Humane Letters in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor Emerita of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University where she taught from 2007-2023. From the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, she was a popular award-winning professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. In 1997, she was recruited to build the African Diaspora Studies Program at Florida International University where she served three successful terms until 2007 when she joined the Cornell faculty. An African Diaspora and Black Feminist Studies scholar in scholarship and in practice, she is a popular speaker on several related topics. In 2015, she was appointed to the prestigious Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon which she deferred and was Visiting Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Beijing, China 2016.. In 2022, she was a visiting professor at the School of Foreign Languages (FLEX), University of Havana during which time she conducted interviews on women and leadership in Cuba, focusing largely on Havana.
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 Christopher Tounsel, an historian of modern Sudan, with special focus on race and religion as political technologies. His first book, Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke 2021), was named a finalist for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora's Outstanding First Book Award and was a Finalist for the Christianity Today Book Award (History/Biography). His most recent book, Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell, 2024), has received honorable mention for the International Studies Association Book Award (Diplomatic Studies section). He has provided Sudan-related commentary for outlets including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, and NPR's Throughline.
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, 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 Nicole Telfer, who teaches in the Department of Psychology at Notre Dame of Maryland University. She is the author of a number of essays in both scholarly and popular venues concerned with education, disability, and the lives of Black children. In this conversation, we discuss the impact of Black Studies on psychology research, the significance of the intersection of Black study and research on disability, and the importance of childhood in thinking about Black 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, 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 Rebecca Wanzo, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of Black study, the place of graphic and popular arts in Black Studies research, and the relevance of critical theoretical work for the field.
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, 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 Shanice Robinson-Blacknell, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Shanice’s research and teaching revolve around pedagogy, activism, and the relationship between academic work and community intervention and collaboration. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of education and pedagogy in Black Studies classrooms, the meaning of community for the past and future of the field, and the distinctiveness of Black ways of making and deploying critical knowledge.
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 Tamara T. Butler, a community cultivator and thought leader who draws upon lessons learned growing up on Johns Island, South Carolina. Currently, she serves as the Executive Director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and Associate Dean of Strategic Planning & Community Engagement for the College of Charleston Libraries.
At the College of Charleston, she is a member of the Executive Committee for African American Studies. Beyond campus, Dr. Butler serves as a commissioner for the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a board member for the Coastal Conservation League and International African American Museum and a trustee for the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation.
The Charleston County School of the Arts alum went on to earn degrees from Xavier University of Louisiana and THE Ohio State University. Prior to joining the team at the Avery Research Center, Dr. Butler was an Associate Professor of Critical Literacies at Michigan State University. As a scholar teaching and working at the intersections of English Education, African American Studies and Ecology, she has authored over 10 journal articles and book chapters that explore youth activism, civic engagement, Black Girlhood, and placemaking. In her co-authored book, Where is the Justice? Engaged Pedagogies in Schools and Communities, Dr. Butler highlights transformative education that centers community partnerships, student voices, and creative educators.
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, 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 Chelsea Mikael Frazier, who teaches in the Department of English at Cornell University. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is completing a manuscript that assembles a Black feminist ecology drawn from Black women’s art, activism, and storytelling. She also hosts and directs the educational consultation platform Ask An Amazon. In this conversation, we discuss the place of ecological and environmental questions in the field of Black Studies, Black feminist innovations in the field, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century.
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 Sara E. Johnson, who teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is a literary historian who specializes in cultural production of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century Caribbean across linguistic and imperial boundaries. She co-directed the UCSD Black Studies Project from 2021-2025. Her most recent book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (2023), works with archival fragments to center the world of enslaved knowledge production that made Moreau’s research life and academic fame possible. It was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, along with prizes from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Historical Association (AHA), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and the French Colonial Historical Society. Her first book, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (2012) is an inter-disciplinary study that explored how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. The book traces expressions of transcolonial black politics in places including Hispaniola, Louisiana, Jamaica, and Cuba, through forms including performance idioms and early black newspapers. Johnson is also the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (2006) and Una ventana a Cuba y los Estudios cubanos (2010).
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, 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 Takiyah Harper-Shipman, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is the author of Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019) and her second monograph, Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of political economy in the field of Black Studies, transnational and comparative study, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century.
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, 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 Michael Gillespie, who teaches in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Along with a number of scholarly essays and critical pieces in key journals and collections, he is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016), co-editor with Lisa Uddin of the groundbreaking art criticism collection Black One Shot, and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Pleasure, Ambivalence, and the Art of Blackness. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as a wide-frame for inquiry, the place of expressive culture in the field, and the particular challenges and gifts of cinema studies for work on Black 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, 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 Jarvis McInnis, who teaches in the Department of English at Duke University. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, he is author of Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, published by Columbia University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the rural Black south in Black Studies, the expansiveness of thinking and theorizing Black life, and how a Black Studies approach to archives and evidence broadens our notion of who does and what is intellectual work.
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 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 Christina Carney, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at University of Missouri. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, she is author of Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego, published by University of California Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative role of gender and class in Black Studies discourse, the importance of Black California for thinking about African American life, and the imperatives for Black Studies to take sexual economies seriously when theorizing the structure of Black life.
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 Ronald Stephens, who teaches in the Program in African American Studies at Purdue University, where he is hosting centennial conference on the life and work of Robert F. Williams (22 October 2025). A nationally and internationally recognized expert on the historically significant African American resort in Idlewild, Michigan, he has authored several important works, including Idlewilde: The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Idlewild: the Black Eden of Michigan (Arcadia, 2001). He is lead co-editor of three volumes: Global Garveyism (University of Florida, 2019), Chicken Bone Beach (Arcadia Publishing, 2023), and African Americans of Denver (Arcadia, 2008), and he is the author of twelve academic journal articles in publications such as the Journal of Black Studies, The Black Scholar, and Black Diaspora Review. He has an article in press with the Michigan Historical Review entitled, “Trailblazers of Justice: Violette Neatley Anderson and Percy J. Langster’s Legal Legacies in Idlewild: the Black Eden and Summer Apollo of Michigan.” Dr. Stephens is currently writing Robert and Mabel Williams: Matrimonial Partnership in Black Resistance History and pursuing a book contract with Wayne State University Press.
Dr. Stephens has appeared as an expert for numerous media outlets including NPR, the HIstory Channel, and the Smithsonian Channel. Notable features include appearances in the documentaries Negroes with Guns and The Green Book: Road to Freedom, as well as Tony Brown’s Journal, Black Nouveau and HGTV’s Historic African American Towns. His contributions continue to deepen our understanding of African American leisure culture, and resistance history. Recently, he launched The Resilience Journey, a 40-minute bi-weekly podcast based on the experiences of Robert and Mabel Williams as a testament to the power of defiance in the face of oppression and the enduring spirit in the fight for human dignity and equality. The show explores stories of perseverance and empowerment, and where history’s echoes shape our past and future. Each episode dives deep into stories of resistance, resilience, courage, and the relentless pursuit of justice through the lens of those who’ve lived it.
He plans to continue the Resilience Journey and write two other African American biographies - 1. About producer Larry Steele from his Smart Affairs revue from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s; and 2. About John White and the Gotham Hotel of Detroit
Dr. Stephens has over a decade of administrative leadership experience, having served as department chair at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Ohio University, as well as program director of African American Studies at various other institutions. He was born and grew up in Detroit. He attended Detroit Public Schools, and graduated from Wayne State University, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in Speech Communication and M.A. and PhD from Temple University in African American Studies. He is the father of two daughters (Kiara and Karielle) and proud grandfather of twelve grandchildren.
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 Mia Bay, Paul Mellon Professor of American History at University of Cambridge. Mia Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history. A graduate of University of Toronto, she completed her post graduate studies at Yale University under the supervision of David Brion Davis. In recent years, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and before that she taught at Rutgers University, where she also directed the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.
Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which also received a PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, the Lillian Smith book Award, the Order of the Coif Book Award and the David J, Langum Prize in Legal History. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2012, 1st Edition, 2016, 2nd Edition), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line( Rutgers University Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.
Bay’s current projects include a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson. Her work has been supported by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Fletcher Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello; the American Council of Learned Societies, Boston University’s Institute on Race and Social Division, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and W.E.B. Du Bois Centers; and the American Historical Association. An Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Bay is a member of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s advisory board and serves on the editorial boards of Reviews in American History, the Journal of African American History, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives Blog.
Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits-- “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968”-- and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History 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, 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 writer and critic Michael Harriot. Along with numerous journalistic pieces in venues such as The Root, Yes! Magazine, TheGrio.com, he is author of the award-winning book Black AF History: The UnWhitewashed Story of America, published by Dey Street Books in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of study in journalistic and popular writing, the varied and deep roots of Black study, and the cultural and political responsibilities that come with writing about Black life in the twenty-first century.
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 Sabrina Evans, who teaches in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University where she specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature with a focus on Black women's writing, archives, and organizing. Her research examines the intellectual thought and literary production of Black clubwomen such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett as well as the networks and communities that helped sustain their intellectual and activist work. She is project co-coordinator for the Black Women's Organizing Archive (BWOA). BWOA is a digital humanities project that seeks to locate the scattered archives of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black women organizers and create teaching and research resources. In this work, she has collaborated with a team of faculty, graduate students, archivists, and librarians to produce papers locators featuring digitized and nondigitized collections of early Black women organizers as well as a digital map highlighting the various libraries and repositories holding their collections.