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 Tiffany E. Barber, who teaches in the Department of Art History at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing pieces, she is the author of Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the place of expressive culture in Black Studies, gender, race, and art historical research, and the importance of multidisciplinary work on expressive life for the history and future of 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 Seulghee Lee, who teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at University of South Carolina. In addition to a number of scholarly pieces, he is the author of OtherLovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (2025) and co-editor with Rebecca Kumar of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture (2024). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between literary and expressive culture in Black Studies, comparative racial and ethnic study, and the importance of critical theoretical work in the history and future of the field.

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 Jimmy Butts, who teaches in the Department of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His research focuses on Black religion and radicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries with an emphasis on the discourses and practices that operate at the intersection of religion and violence. His current book project examines the way Malcolm X constructed a revolutionary form of religion over the course of his public life.