Kimberly Blockett - Department of Africana Studies, University of Delaware

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 Kimberly Blockett, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Delaware. Along with a number of scholarly articles in prominent journals, she has published two books - Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Nineteenth-Century Travels of Zilpha Elaw, Black Woman Evangelist (2023) and a scholarly edition of Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour (2021) In this conversation, we discuss the importance of recovering lost voices in a multidisciplinary approach to history, the place of religion in Black study, and the exciting, productive, and imaginative messiness of Black Studies research.