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, 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.

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 Johnathan White, who teaches in the Department of History at Penn State, Greater Allegheny. He has taught courses in history, African American studies, black arts, and leadership development. He co-founded the Study of Hip-Hop Conference and the Stewart and Jones Scholar Leadership Program. He is a founding member of the Crossing Bridges committee which serves the surrounding community. In addition, he chairs the Anti-Racism task force at PSUGA. He is also creator of the Black Woman Reaffirmed video project. His up coming album, Love Algorithms, is an eclectic mix of poetry, hip-hop, and spoken word. Finally, he is co-authoring a book, ‘A Love We Need…’, which examines what a divided America can learn from 50 years of Hip Hop culture. He is a board member of the Langston Hughes Poetry Society. In addition, he served as lead instructor of the Full Armor Institute, mentoring young black men at Mt. Olive Baptist church. Moreover, he has conducted black history workshops and seminars on living a vibrant lifestyle that synthesizes faith and the pursuit of social justice. He was awarded the Dr. James Robinson Equal Opportunity Award (honoring those who fight for equity at Penn State) in 2021. He received the highly competitive Atherton Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021 as well. Finally, in 2022 he was a Pittsburgh Courier Men of Excellence honoree. He was recognized for his contribution in the field of education.

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 Watufani Poe, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Along with scholarly and public-facing pieces, he is completing a manuscript entitled Resisting Fragmentation: The Embodied Politics of Black Queer Worldmaking, an ethnohistoric study of Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in Brazil and the United States that outlines how Black LGBTQ+ people push for freedom across various social and political movement spaces and imagine alternative worlds. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of language and transnational work in Black Studies, the political impact of Black study, and the place of questions of gender and sexuality in the field.