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 Robert P. Robinson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Gender Studies at John Jay College and Doctoral Faculty in Urban Education, Africana Studies, and Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Prior to higher education, he was a K-12 educator and mentor for 11 years. His broad research and teaching focus on the Black Freedom Movement, Black education history, Blackqueer studies, digital humanities, history of education, and curriculum studies. Robinson’s work can be found in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal for Multicultural Education, and The Killens Review of Arts & Letters, and more. Robinson is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow for his forthcoming book, Education for the Revolution: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, which will be published in January 2027 through NYU Press’s Black Power Series.