This is John Drabinski 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 Utz McKnight, Professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama, where he teaches courses on political theory in a Black Studies context. McKnight is the author of four books: Political Liberalism and the Politics of Race (1996), The Everyday Practice of Race in America: Ambiguous Privilege (2010), Race and the Politics of the Exception: Equality, Sovereignty, and American Democracy (2013), and most recently Frances E.W. Harper: A Call to Conscience (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the power of Black Studies for thinking nation, community, and democracy and the challenges of questions of diversity, class, and gender in the field.

This is John Drabinski 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 three faculty members from the Department of Africana Studies at Buffalo State University. Naila Ansari is a dancer and a professor in the Department of Theater. John Torrey is a theorist and a professor in the Philosophy Department. Marcus Watson is an ethnographer and anthropologist and a professor in the individualized study program. All are core members of the Department of Africana Studies at Buffalo State, where Watson also serves as Chairperson. In this conversation, we explore the relation of Black study to social and racial justice, scholarship-community relations, and the future of work in Black Studies from a community and social transformation perspective.

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 Professor Jessica Marie Johnson, who teaches and writes on the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the cultural history of the African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, which was published in 2020 by University of Pennsylvania Press, and is at work on a cluster of projects that engage early post-slavery history in the United States and digital representations of Black women and engagement with the history of enslavement. You can read more about her ongoing research at her professional page jessicamariejohnson.com.