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 Zana Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersections of visual culture, contemporary Black Art, media, and technology with an emphasis on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in how Black artists and cultural producers use visual technologies in their image-making practices to shape political consciousness and cultural memory, document, and reimagine Black social life. In this conversation, we explore the link between histories of struggle and Black Studies practice, the encoding of blackness in popular and visual culture, and the past and future of community work as constitutive of the field.

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 writer and critic Dionne Ford. In addition to a number of pieces in popular and writerly venues, she is co-editor with Jill Strauss of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the role of study in creative writing, the place of memoir and storytelling in the study of Black life, and the intimacy and social significance of Black writing.

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 Jarvis Givens, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and School of Education at Harvard University. Along with a number of essays in popular and academic venues, he is co-editor of "We Dare Say Love": Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys (2018) and author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the place of education and education writing in African American history, the culture and politics of Black study, and the imperative for Black Studies to impact community educational spaces.

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 writer and poet Khalisa Rae Thompson, who is co-founder and co-director of Griot and Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference. Her writing has been featured in a number of literary and popular venues and she is the author of Real Girls Have Real Problems and of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat. In this conversation, we discuss the intersection of writing and memory work, poetry and community connection, and the politics of publishing 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, 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 Robert J. Patterson, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at Georgetown University. Along with numerous scholarly essays in journals and edited collections, he is the author of Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality (2019) and Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture (2013), co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (2016), and editor of the award-winning Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights (2019). In this conversation, we discuss curriculum writing and Black Studies, historical research and Black study, and the place of cultural studies in the field.

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 Shylah Hamilton-Touré, who teaches in the Program in Critical Ethnic Studies at the California College of the Arts and is also Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Jambalaya Center for Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts. She is a writer and practicing artist whose work explores themes of gender, diaspora, and indigeneity through critical and visual practice. In this conversation, we explore the importance of surrealism for articulating the meaning of Black life, decolonial and indigenous resources for thinking blackness and liberation, and the place of art and expressive culture in Black Studies.

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.