Blair LM Kelley - Department of American Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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 discussion is with Blair LM Kelley, who is Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the director of the Center for the Study of the American South. In addition to a number of public facing and scholarly essays, she is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class. In this conversation, we explore the relationship between personal archives and historical writing, family stories and Black study, and the new horizons of historically-grounded research in the field of Black Studies.