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 Derek Handley, who teaches in the Department of English at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Along with a number of articles on rhetoric, urban studies, and composition, he is the author of Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance during the Black Freedom Movement (2024).In this conversation, we discuss the the place of rhetorical work in the Black intellectual tradition, community work and politics, and the future of Black Studies as a multi-disciplinary project.

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, 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 Dr. Alisha Gaines who is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. She is the co-humanities director of the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School in Edgard, Louisana, and is currently writing her second manuscript “Children of the Plantionocene” which centers on Black American origin stories, Black craftscapes, and what we collectively inherit from the plantation. In this conversation, we discuss: black study as an integral component of an insurgent black radical tradition, the black south and the plantation as rich spaces of knowledge production, and the role of black studies in the fight against local, national, and global dimensions of anti-blackness and fascism today

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 with with Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Keel has received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. He is the author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science and co-editor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. His latest book is The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence.