This is John Drabinski 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, 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 Robin Means Coleman, Professor of Media Studies and of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia where she is also Director of the Black Fantastic Media Research Lab. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular essays, she is the author of Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, published as a second edition in 2023, and,] African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor, published in 2000. She is co-author of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar (2023) and Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014). She is the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002) and co-editor of both The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2024) and Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (2008). In this conversation, we discuss the dynamic character of Black Studies in relation to community-campus relations, the political nature of research and teaching, and the complex relationship between Black Studies and study focused on Black topics

This is John Drabinski 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, 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 Jervette R. Ward, who teaches in and chairs the newly re-established Department of Black Studies at The City College of New York. In addition to her writing and editing work on African American literature and popular culture, she serves as president of the College Language Association. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between Black studies and literature, how the past struggles to establish the field inform ongoing Black liberation struggle, and how the past and future of Black Studies engages with community life and its everyday habits, objects, and complex practices.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 episode features Rita Kiki Edozie, the Deval Patrick Endowed Chair of Political, Economic, and Social Innovation and Professor of Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is the university’s former interim Dean of the John W McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies. Her recent books, The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance (2014) and Pan-Africa Rising: The Cultural Political Economy of Nigeria’s Afri-capitalism and South Africa’s Ubuntu Business (2017), and Africa’s New Global Politics: Regionalism in International Relations (with Moses Khisa, 2022).