LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant - Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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 LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, who teaches in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she also serves as Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. Her work is invested in history, spirituality, and memory, with a particular focus on African American women and religion. To that end, she is the author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (2014) and has edited two books, Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions, with Carol B. Duncan and Tamura A. Lomax (2014) and Fat Religion: Protestant Christianity and the Construction of the Fat Body, with Lynne Gerber and Susan Hill (2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of historical and religious study in Black Studies, spiritual practice as Black study, and how questions of gender and region transform our approach to the field.