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 Ronald Angelo Johnson, Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. His latest book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, published in 2025 by Cornell University Press, is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution, which brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. Entangled Alliances has received the Texas Institute of Letters Honor Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Johnson is currently working on the book We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press), a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. His first book was Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance, and he is the co-editor (with Ousmane Power-Greene) of the book In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Johnson serves as Steward of the Ella Wall Prichard Fund for Early Black Baptist History (EBBH) at Baylor University, which supports the study, research, and documentation of Black Baptist life and thought in North America up to 1866.

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 Bettina Judd, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. She is a poet and critic whose research explores Black feminist methods and sensibilities. Along with a number of scholarly articles and published poems, including the collection Patient (2014), she is the author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (2023). In this conversation, we explore the origins of Black ways of knowing and knowledge production, the importance of cultural study for Black Studies, and the place of creative work 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 Christel Temple, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Africana cultural memory studies, Pan-Africanism, the intersection of History and Literature, comparative Black literature, and Afroeuropean Studies. Along with numerous scholarly articles, including —"A Value Added Module for Introduction to Black Studies: Speaking in the Disciplines and Africana Market Value," in Afrocentric Innovations in Higher Education, she is the author of Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism (2005), Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise (2017), Black Cultural Mythology (2020), and co-editor with James L. Conyers, Jr. of Muhammad Ali in Africana Cultural Memory (2022). In this conversation, we discuss the distinctiveness of Black Studies methods and disciplinary work, the transformative work of Black study in the classroom, and how Black Studies works both inside and outside traditional disciplines and areas of study.

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 Kevin Rigby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research is concerned with the complex effects and affects of afropessimist theory for thinking through issues of history, culture, and politics, specifically focused on the structure and meaning of Black protest. In this conversation, we explore the place of pessimist theory in Black study, political mobilization and community work, and how Black Studies shapes research and the classroom.

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 Ifetayo Flannery, who teaches in the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University. Her research focuses on Black Studies methodology, questions of identity across the African diaspora, and the expansive significance of religious traditions. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Lineage: Religious Culture & the (Re)Makings of Ethnic Identity in the African Diaspora and editor of the collection An Introduction to Black Psychology. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of Black Studies as a discipline, the contributions and challenges of Africological approaches to the field, and how Black Studies methodologies shape and reshape ethical, political, and cultural 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 Tanisha M. Jackson, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University where she is also Executive Director of the Community Folk Art Center. Her research focuses on the place of community art practice and education in liberation struggle. Along with a number of scholarly essays and curated exhibitions, she is the author Black Women's Art Ecosystems: Sites of Wellness and Self-care (2025), which was awarded the Anna Julia Cooper and CLR James award for outstanding publication in Africana Studies (National Council for Black Studies). She recently received an National Endowment for the Arts grant for the Community Folk Art Center's inaugural artists in residency program and she is the founder and host of the film series, Black Arts Speak. In this conversation, we discuss the place of art in the field of Black Studies, how art and community expand our sense of liberation work, and how the Black Studies classroom links the personal, the communal, and the aesthetic.

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.

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 Melanie Holmes, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the meaning and significance of Black Power across geographies, in particular in the political and cultural space of the United States and Barbados. Her work on these issues can be found in a cluster of publications, including “Beautifully Black!: How Negro History Week and the Black History Movement Influenced Education in and Beyond the Black Power Era,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of African American History. In this conversation, we explore the complex history of resistance to antiblack racism, the relationship between Black study and education, and how historical research both grounds and expands the Black Studies imagination.