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, 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 Shanice Robinson-Blacknell, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Shanice’s research and teaching revolve around pedagogy, activism, and the relationship between academic work and community intervention and collaboration. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of education and pedagogy in Black Studies classrooms, the meaning of community for the past and future of the field, and the distinctiveness of Black ways of making and deploying critical knowledge.
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 Tamara T. Butler, a community cultivator and thought leader who draws upon lessons learned growing up on Johns Island, South Carolina. Currently, she serves as the Executive Director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and Associate Dean of Strategic Planning & Community Engagement for the College of Charleston Libraries.
At the College of Charleston, she is a member of the Executive Committee for African American Studies. Beyond campus, Dr. Butler serves as a commissioner for the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a board member for the Coastal Conservation League and International African American Museum and a trustee for the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation.
The Charleston County School of the Arts alum went on to earn degrees from Xavier University of Louisiana and THE Ohio State University. Prior to joining the team at the Avery Research Center, Dr. Butler was an Associate Professor of Critical Literacies at Michigan State University. As a scholar teaching and working at the intersections of English Education, African American Studies and Ecology, she has authored over 10 journal articles and book chapters that explore youth activism, civic engagement, Black Girlhood, and placemaking. In her co-authored book, Where is the Justice? Engaged Pedagogies in Schools and Communities, Dr. Butler highlights transformative education that centers community partnerships, student voices, and creative educators.
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, 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 Chelsea Mikael Frazier, who teaches in the Department of English at Cornell University. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is completing a manuscript that assembles a Black feminist ecology drawn from Black women’s art, activism, and storytelling. She also hosts and directs the educational consultation platform Ask An Amazon. In this conversation, we discuss the place of ecological and environmental questions in the field of Black Studies, Black feminist innovations in the field, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century.
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 Sara E. Johnson, who teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is a literary historian who specializes in cultural production of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century Caribbean across linguistic and imperial boundaries. She co-directed the UCSD Black Studies Project from 2021-2025. Her most recent book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (2023), works with archival fragments to center the world of enslaved knowledge production that made Moreau’s research life and academic fame possible. It was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, along with prizes from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Historical Association (AHA), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and the French Colonial Historical Society. Her first book, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (2012) is an inter-disciplinary study that explored how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. The book traces expressions of transcolonial black politics in places including Hispaniola, Louisiana, Jamaica, and Cuba, through forms including performance idioms and early black newspapers. Johnson is also the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (2006) and Una ventana a Cuba y los Estudios cubanos (2010).
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, 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 Takiyah Harper-Shipman, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is the author of Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019) and her second monograph, Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of political economy in the field of Black Studies, transnational and comparative study, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century.
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, 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 Michael Gillespie, who teaches in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Along with a number of scholarly essays and critical pieces in key journals and collections, he is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016), co-editor with Lisa Uddin of the groundbreaking art criticism collection Black One Shot, and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Pleasure, Ambivalence, and the Art of Blackness. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as a wide-frame for inquiry, the place of expressive culture in the field, and the particular challenges and gifts of cinema studies for work on Black life.
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, 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 Jarvis McInnis, who teaches in the Department of English at Duke University. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, he is author of Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South, published by Columbia University Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the place of the rural Black south in Black Studies, the expansiveness of thinking and theorizing Black life, and how a Black Studies approach to archives and evidence broadens our notion of who does and what is intellectual 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.
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, 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 Christina Carney, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at University of Missouri. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, she is author of Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego, published by University of California Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative role of gender and class in Black Studies discourse, the importance of Black California for thinking about African American life, and the imperatives for Black Studies to take sexual economies seriously when theorizing the structure of Black life.
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 Ronald Stephens, who teaches in the Program in African American Studies at Purdue University, where he is hosting centennial conference on the life and work of Robert F. Williams (22 October 2025). A nationally and internationally recognized expert on the historically significant African American resort in Idlewild, Michigan, he has authored several important works, including Idlewilde: The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Idlewild: the Black Eden of Michigan (Arcadia, 2001). He is lead co-editor of three volumes: Global Garveyism (University of Florida, 2019), Chicken Bone Beach (Arcadia Publishing, 2023), and African Americans of Denver (Arcadia, 2008), and he is the author of twelve academic journal articles in publications such as the Journal of Black Studies, The Black Scholar, and Black Diaspora Review. He has an article in press with the Michigan Historical Review entitled, “Trailblazers of Justice: Violette Neatley Anderson and Percy J. Langster’s Legal Legacies in Idlewild: the Black Eden and Summer Apollo of Michigan.” Dr. Stephens is currently writing Robert and Mabel Williams: Matrimonial Partnership in Black Resistance History and pursuing a book contract with Wayne State University Press.
Dr. Stephens has appeared as an expert for numerous media outlets including NPR, the HIstory Channel, and the Smithsonian Channel. Notable features include appearances in the documentaries Negroes with Guns and The Green Book: Road to Freedom, as well as Tony Brown’s Journal, Black Nouveau and HGTV’s Historic African American Towns. His contributions continue to deepen our understanding of African American leisure culture, and resistance history. Recently, he launched The Resilience Journey, a 40-minute bi-weekly podcast based on the experiences of Robert and Mabel Williams as a testament to the power of defiance in the face of oppression and the enduring spirit in the fight for human dignity and equality. The show explores stories of perseverance and empowerment, and where history’s echoes shape our past and future. Each episode dives deep into stories of resistance, resilience, courage, and the relentless pursuit of justice through the lens of those who’ve lived it.
He plans to continue the Resilience Journey and write two other African American biographies - 1. About producer Larry Steele from his Smart Affairs revue from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s; and 2. About John White and the Gotham Hotel of Detroit
Dr. Stephens has over a decade of administrative leadership experience, having served as department chair at Metropolitan State University of Denver and Ohio University, as well as program director of African American Studies at various other institutions. He was born and grew up in Detroit. He attended Detroit Public Schools, and graduated from Wayne State University, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in Speech Communication and M.A. and PhD from Temple University in African American Studies. He is the father of two daughters (Kiara and Karielle) and proud grandfather of twelve grandchildren.
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 Mia Bay, Paul Mellon Professor of American History at University of Cambridge. Mia Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history. A graduate of University of Toronto, she completed her post graduate studies at Yale University under the supervision of David Brion Davis. In recent years, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and before that she taught at Rutgers University, where she also directed the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.
Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), which also received a PROSE Award for Excellence in American History, the OAH’s Liberty Legacy Award, the Lillian Smith book Award, the Order of the Coif Book Award and the David J, Langum Prize in Legal History. Her other works include The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and the edited work Ida B Wells, The Light of Truth: The Writings of An Anti-Lynching Crusader (Penguin Books, 2014). She is also the co-author, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2012, 1st Edition, 2016, 2nd Edition), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line( Rutgers University Press, 2015), which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.
Bay’s current projects include a new book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson. Her work has been supported by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Fletcher Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello; the American Council of Learned Societies, Boston University’s Institute on Race and Social Division, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and W.E.B. Du Bois Centers; and the American Historical Association. An Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Bay is a member of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s advisory board and serves on the editorial boards of Reviews in American History, the Journal of African American History, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives Blog.
Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibits-- “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968”-- and serving a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.
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, 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 writer and critic Michael Harriot. Along with numerous journalistic pieces in venues such as The Root, Yes! Magazine, TheGrio.com, he is author of the award-winning book Black AF History: The UnWhitewashed Story of America, published by Dey Street Books in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of study in journalistic and popular writing, the varied and deep roots of Black study, and the cultural and political responsibilities that come with writing about Black life in the twenty-first century.
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 Sabrina Evans, who teaches in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University where she specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature with a focus on Black women's writing, archives, and organizing. Her research examines the intellectual thought and literary production of Black clubwomen such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett as well as the networks and communities that helped sustain their intellectual and activist work. She is project co-coordinator for the Black Women's Organizing Archive (BWOA). BWOA is a digital humanities project that seeks to locate the scattered archives of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black women organizers and create teaching and research resources. In this work, she has collaborated with a team of faculty, graduate students, archivists, and librarians to produce papers locators featuring digitized and nondigitized collections of early Black women organizers as well as a digital map highlighting the various libraries and repositories holding their collections.
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.
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.