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 conversation is with Professor Nathaniel Norment, Professor of English at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia where he also directs the Black Ink Project. He is well-known for his innovations in the field of Black Studies as a writer and cultural historian, and in addition to a number of scholarly articles he is the author-editor of a number of key books including Readings in African American Language, The African American Studies Reader, The Addison Gayle, Jr. Reader, and African American Studies: The Discipline and its Dimensions. In this conversation, he reflects on his journey into the study of Black life, the history of the field, and the place of critical expressive writing in the development of Black Studies thought, reflection, and its intellectual contributions.