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.

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 with Crystal N. Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History and affiliated faculty in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where she also serves as the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College. A native of North Carolina, she is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, U.S. women’s history, and the American South. Her scholarship examines racial and sexual violence, bridging social and political history to illuminate long-obscured dimensions of the American past. Attentive to absences and asymmetries in the archive, she draws on gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to interpret some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.

Professor Feimster earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press), recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and honorable mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize. Her award-winning scholarship also includes the article “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” which received the Kentucky Historical Society’s Collins Award for best article in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” which received honorable mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She has published widely in leading journals and has written essays for broader audiences in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. She is currently completing two books, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.

Her professional appointments reflect her leadership in the field. She is President of the Southern Association of Women’s Historians, a member of the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, Associate Editor of Civil War History, and Contributing Editor to Labor. She previously served as Co-President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and has held numerous leadership roles in national scholarly organizations. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and other distinguished institutions. A devoted and award-winning teacher, Professor Feimster offers well-subscribed courses on the Long Civil Rights Movement, African American Women’s History, Critical Race Theory, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In recognition of her commitment to undergraduate and graduate mentorship, she has received multiple honors, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Yale Provost Teaching Prize, the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize, the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring, and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities.

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 Maya Doig-Acuña, doctoral candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her work is invested in history and memory studies, with a particular focus on Afro-Latinx culture and identity that emphasizes diasporic movement and structures of kinship. To that end, she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation under the title We are Her Beloved Descendants: Alternate Archives of Afro-Panamanian Memory, Diaspora, and Kinship. In this conversation, we discuss the expansive reach of Black Studies, how Black study informs multidisciplinary approaches to the past, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape critical discourse around memory studies and historical research.

This is Brie Gorrell 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, 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 Dr. Willie Jamaal Wright who is a Research Fellow within the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include the study of urban and black geographies throughout the Black Diaspora. His writing has appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the Black Scholar, City & Society and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Urban Studies Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. He is currently co-editing the late geographer, Bobby M. Wilson’s Consumer Political Economy and African America for the University of Georgia Press. Lastly, Dr. Wright is working on his first sole-authored text, Valorizing the Void: Place and Public Art in the Houston's Third Ward. In this conversation, we discuss black geographies as emerging field in black studies, black studies as life studies, as well as a place of refuge for black students.

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 Mark Sanders, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and English at University of Notre Dame. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles on African American and Afro-Caribbean literature and culture, as well as author, editor, and translator of three books, Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown (1999), Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South (co-edited with John Edgar Tidwell from 2007) and A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence (2010). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of transnational study, language diversity in the Black Americas, and the fecundity of Black Studies critical frames for the study of literature and culture.

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 with Jocelyn Brown, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Ohio University with training in gerontology, applied sociology, and applied psychology. Originally from West Virginia, her scholarship centers Black Appalachian life across the life course. She has a particular focus on health disparities, structural racism, and the political-economic conditions shaping Black communities in Appalachia, the wider U.S., and the African diaspora.

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 with Drew D. Brown, Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Florida, specializing in the intersections of Black Culture and Sports. His current book manuscript explores “Baller Culture,” the hip-hop-informed Black cultural expression found in sports. Analyzing sports media from 1988 to 2008, he argues that film, magazines, and commercials became a public arena where young Black Americans negotiated their cultural expression to shape and reshape identities, build community, and gain popularity. The book shows how they deployed a hybrid identity, which was often commodified and misrepresented by the media. Ultimately, the book highlights the constantly evolving nature of Black cultural identity.

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 Nneka Dennie, who teaches in the Department of History at Washington and Lee University. She has published on early African-American thought and history, with particular attention to the work of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and is the author and editor of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist (2023) and the in-progress book Redefining Radicalism: Black Women Intellectuals in the Nineteenth Century. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of historical and cultural research in the field of Black Studies, the place of gender in work on the African American intellectual tradition, and the urgency of the study of Black radical thought in our contemporary moment.