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 Amiri Mahnzili, who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching interests range across pan-African concerns with history, memory, expressive life, and radical political mobilization. With Lawson Bush and Edward C. Bush, he is co-author of Sankofa (Re)search Model: (Re)membevring, (Re)storing, and (Re)birthing Black Boys and Men (2025) In this conversation, we discuss the importance of pedagogy in Black Studies, radical politics, and the place of pan-African intellectual and political work 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 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.

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 J.T. Roane, who teaches in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing pieces, he is the author of Dark Agora: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, published by New York University Press in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between historical writing, research, and Black Studies sensibilities, community work and study, and the place of ecological thinking in 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 Aria Halliday, who teaches in the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African American and Africana Studies at University of Kentucky. Along with a number of scholarly and public facing essays, she is the author of two books: Black Girls and How We Fail Them (2025) and Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed U.S. Pop Culture (2022), as well as the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019). In this conversation, we discuss the place of gender studies and historical experience in the study of Black life, the ethics and politics of the field, and how Black Studies sensibilities change the nature of research and pedagogy.

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.

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 Tracie Canada, who teaches in the Departments of Cultural Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the founding director of the Health, Ethnography and Race through Sports Lab and is the author of Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football. In this conversation, we discuss the cultural and racial politics of sports, particularly sports in higher-ed spaces, and the place of those racial politics in Black Studies and in the study of Black life.