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.

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 Wendyliz Martinez, a 2024 ACLS Leading Edge fellow where she works with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice developing a digital humanities project related to the history of slavery within the state of New Jersey. She earned her doctorate in English and African American Studies at Penn State University and is a City College of New York and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow alumna. She is currently writing about Black girlhood and its depictions in social media, film, and literature, and maintains interest in art practices from Black communities and its impact on our understanding of Blackness as well as its role in preserving histories.

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 Brenda E. Stevenson, Professor of African American Studies and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of a number of important scholarly articles and has written and edited several important books: Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1997), The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots, (2013) What is Slavery? (2015), What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?: A History of the Enslaved Black Family (2023), and was the critical editor of The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, published in 1989. In this conversation, we discuss her place in the field of Black Studies, how historical research enhances the study of Black life, and how Black Studies methodologies and sensibilities impact the study and writing of history.