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 Maya Cunningham, who teaches in the School of Performing Arts at American University in Washington, D.C. Along with scholarly articles, she is the author of the forthcoming book Jazz Malungaje: Understanding the Cultural Identity Implications in African American Jazz from the South African Jazz Tradition. She is also a trained and practicing jazz vocalist with extensive performance history. In this conversation, we discuss African American musical history, Black study and community work, and the place of ethnography and enthomusicology 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 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.

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 Nicole Fleetwood, a writer, curator, and art critic who teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Along with numerous articles and critical pieces, she is the author of Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), curator of the traveling exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” the book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which won the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism, and most, recently, Between the River and Railroad Tracks, forthcoming in November 2026. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. In this conversation, we discuss writing about place, memoir and Black study, and the meaning of history and memory in Black life.

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 Bobby Smith, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Trained as a sociologist with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith’s research examines how Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food have shaped their lives and the world. He is the James Beard–nominated author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America. His other work has appeared in public and scholarly outlets including Time, The Conversation, Word In Black, and the Journal of Black Studies.

Bobby Smith earned a Ph.D. in development sociology and an M.S. in applied and agricultural economics from Cornell University, and a B.S. (summa cum laude) in agriculture – agricultural economics from Prairie View A&M 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 Natanya Duncan, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Queens College in New York City. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is author of the groundbreaking work An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, published by University of North Carolina Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss historical writing as Black study, the place of gender in African American and diasporic history, and the obligations and imperatives for Black Studies in the contemporary moment.

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 Logan Shanks, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Grounded in traditions of Black feminist theory and study, her work analyzes the afterlife of slavery in Black visual and sonic aesthetics in the South and how violence is made pleasurable in Black popular culture and performance in the Americas. In this conversation, we discuss diasporic sensibilities in study, popular culture as history and theory, and how vernacular life sits in the heart of the Black Studies tradition.