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 W. Lawrence Hogue, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Houston. He received his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, with an emphasis on 20th Century American literature, U S Minority literatures, and Critical Theory. He was one of the first critics to raise questions about literary production, representation, and canon formation in African American literature,opening up an entirely new area of intellectual inquiry. He is the author of Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text, which has been republished as an e-book (Duke 1986), Race, Modernity; Post-modernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s (SUNY 1996); The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (SUNY 2003); Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (Illinois 2009); Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives (SUNY 2013); and A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation (2020). He wrote the introduction to Clarence Major’s My Amputations (reissued 2008), and is researching and writing a literary biography of the novelist Charles Wright. He is the recipient of a Ford Foundation-National Research Council Fellowship, as well as several grants and fellowships at the University of Houston. He has book reviews, book chapters, and articles published in the major journals and critical anthologies in the academy.

Active in American Literature, African American Literature, Minority Literatures, Postmodern Literature, and Critical Theory, he has lectured and presented papers at universities and conferences throughout the United States and Canada. His interest in postmodern fiction and diasporic African literatures has taken him to Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, and Argentina.

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 Laurian Bowles, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Davidson College. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (2025), which follows women head porters in Ghana to examine how women navigate precarity with creativity and care, offering a fresh analytic on racial capitalism, sexual autonomy and urban futurity in Africa. In this conversation, we explore the impact of Black Studies on ethnographic practices, Black study in a digital age, and the critical tension between Black Studies practices and institutions of higher education.

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 Amanda Boston, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Black Studies approaches to urban studies, questions of neoliberalism and economics, and the impact of structural racism on housing in historically Black communities.She is completing her first book on gentrification’s racial operations and the making and unmaking of Black communities in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and she has published related works in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes in sociology and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches to the study of Black urban life, the relationship between social scientific methodologies and the traditions of Black Studies, and the impact of Black Studies research on Black communities and struggles for racial justice.