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 Davarian Baldwin, Raether Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College. He is the award-winning author of several books, most recently In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities and worked as the consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle. In addition to teaching and writing, Baldwin has served in the national leadership of the American Association of University Professors and Scholars for Social Justice and sits on several editorial boards including the Journal of African American History and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. His commentaries and opinions have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, BBC, and HULU to USA Today, The Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Baldwin was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work in racial and economic justice.

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 Natasha Henry-Dixon, who teaches in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Along with numerous scholarly and public-facing pieces, she is the author of Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (2010), Talking about Freedom (2012). She also maintains the website One Too Many: Black People Enslaved in Upper Canada, 1760-1834. In this conversation, we discuss the history of Black people in Canada, the complicated relationship between the four centuries of Black presence and the place of immigrants in the Black Canadian imagination, and the importance of public history, education, and Black study.

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 Tara T. Green, who is the CLASS Distinguished Professor and Chair of African American Studies at the University of Houston. She also has a joint appointment in the English department. Dr. Green is a literary and interdisciplinary studies scholar with a doctorate in English. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books, including Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era as well as the co-curator of the Triad Black Lives Matter Collection housed at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Black feminism and her Southern familial experiences with storytelling influence her approach to her research areas, which include African American fiction and autobiography, African literature, Black leadership/activism, Black Southern studies, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is from the suburbs of New Orleans, which immensely impacts her work.

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.

Tony Louis is a veteran educator with extensive experience in the public school systems of New York, Florida, and Maryland. A specialist in advanced instruction, he has primarily taught International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) literature courses and served as an MYP coordinator. His pedagogy is rooted in the belief that learning is both critical and contextual—an active process in which students collaborate to construct meaning and engage deeply with the world around them. He is also a staunch advocate for educational equity, holding that all students deserve meaningful access to higher education. In pursuit of this mission, he has taught Literature and Critical Race Theory courses for Upward Bound programs at Morehouse College and Rollins College. Over the past three years, he has also pioneered the teaching of Hip-Hop history and culture at the secondary level in Maryland, one of the few such courses in the state.

Through his Power Dreaming initiative, Louis remains committed to amplifying student voices by fostering direct dialogue with leading scholars, artists, and thought leaders—without intermediaries. His career reflects both a passion for intellectual rigor and a dedication to cultivating joy, engagement, and empowerment in the classroom.

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 Rosa Clemente, a scholar, activist, and late-doctoral candidate in the Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In this conversation, we explore the complex questions of Afro-Latinx identity, cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarity, and the meaning of Black Studies in times of deep political crisis.

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 Anna LaQuawn Hinton, assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) and CLA Journal, as well as contributed to The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body, The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature, and The Palgrave Handbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature. Her monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing, which approaches themes in Black feminist literary studies such as aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity through a Black feminist disability frame, is now available through the University Press of Mississippi. Dr. Hinton is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.

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 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 Leonard McKinnis, who teaches in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Along with a number of scholarly pieces, he is the author of The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the place of religious studies in the Black Studies tradition, the relationship between ethnographic and historical research, and how close attention to emerging Black religious sensibilities reveal ethical and political visions to Black study.