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 Christin Washington, a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland. Her interests lie at the intersection of Caribbean studies, the cultural labor of Black women’s religious practices, digital studies, and immersive forms of scholarship and and expressive work. In this conversation, we discuss the place of love and imagination in Black Studies, design as intellectual work, and digital studies as play, immersion, and meaning-making.

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 Walidah Imarisha, Director of the Center for Black Studies and Associate Professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. She is the co-editor of two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. She is also the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She spent 6 years with the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project as a public scholar facilitating programs across the state about Oregon Black history and other topics. In 2015, she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing. In this conversation, we discuss the political meaning of Black Studies, the place of speculative thinking and fiction in the field, and the forms of time appropriate to the study of Black life, history, and expressive culture.

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 Qiana Whitted, who teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature and in the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. In addition to numerous articles on African American literature and graphic culture, she is the author of three books - ‘A God of Justice?’: The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature (2009), EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (2019), Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023) - and is the editor, with Brannon Costello, of Comics and the U.S. South (2012). In this conversation, we discuss the place of material culture in Black Studies, the meaning of graphic and comic book representation of Black life, and how an expanding sense of a Black Studies archive impacts the field.