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 Britt Rusert, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and is Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. Rusert is the author of The Afric-American Picture Gallery: William J. Wilson’s Speculative Museum of Black Art (Duke, 2026) and Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU, 2017). With Whitney Battle-Baptiste, she is co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book. Another book-length project, The Care Underground: Mutual Aid in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, is forthcoming from Verso.

Rusert holds a PhD in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University and a BA in English from Allegheny College. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She was a 2024-25 NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a 2023-24 Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

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 Armond Towns, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Williams College. Along with numerous scholarly pieces, he is the author of On Black Media Philosophy (2022) and is currently at work on a new book that takes a Black Studies approach to questions of artificial intelligence and cognate emergent forms of computational work tentatively titled The Artificial Life of Intelligence: The Liberal Arts and AI. In this conversation, we discuss political history and theory, media studies and Black study, and the place of the Black radical tradition in the field of 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 Aja Marie Lans, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Sh is an archaeologist of the African Diaspora who integrates Black feminism and Black study into bioarchaeological investigations. A major area of focus is the objectification of human remains contained within universities and museum collections. She argues for the repatriation of Black Ancestors who are “owned” by such institutions.

Dr. Lans serves as the site bioarchaeologist at the Harlem African Burial Ground (HABG), a project coordinated by the New York City Economic Development Council and the Harlem African Burial Ground Initiative. Originally established as a segregated cemetery when the Dutch colonized Manhattan, the HABG was in use for over two centuries. After the land was sold in the mid-1800s, the section of the cemetery reserved for people of African descent was developed multiple times, most recently as a bus depot for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Before arriving at Hopkins, Dr. Lans was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. There, she performed provenance research on Black Ancestors who are curated in Harvard’s Peabody Museum with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.