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 Antoine Williams, a multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of drawing in the expanded field in the School of Art and Art History at University of Florida. His work has been exhibited across the United States and he’s held numerous fellowships and residencies in the arts.His interactive, multimedia, site-specific installation with Josiah Golson titled “Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right” is being exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art through early-July 2026. In this conversation, we discuss roots of his concern with Black life, the relationship between study and creative production, and the place of the arts in the Black Studies project.

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 Angela Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard-Columbia. She studies the political economy of suburban Black middle-class suburbs, and her forthcoming book Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage, February 2026) asks why majority-Black suburbs that work hard to build stable, thriving communities still face financial barriers that make this harder than it is for their white counterparts.

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 Robert Bland, who teaches in the Departments of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. My research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory.

His latest book - Requieum for Reconstruction Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation - examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. It explores the efforts of black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed Compromise of 1877. In doing so, he illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, local schools, and representations of Gullah folklore and the simultaneous debate in the national black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order.