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 Stephanie Sparling Williams, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial practice is predicated on interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching on American art, and foregrounds Black Feminist space-making. She is the author of Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O'Grady and the Art of Language from 2021 and Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, forthcoming in 2025. Her scholarly work is invested in the space of the museum, with a focus on African American art and culture, and the work of U.S.-based artists of color, as well as material histories, cross cultural exchange, strategies of address, and contemporary art that engages with the history of the United States. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative work of Black study and Black Studies, the museum as community and political space, and the place of beauty and joy in thinking about Black life.

(Photo credit: Hector René Membreño-Canales)

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 Aisha Durham, Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life in the "post" era using auto/ethnography, performance writing, and Black feminist intersectional approaches refined in hip hop feminism. She engages these methods in her two edited books and NCA award-winning monograph Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. She has edited journal special issues about local Florida and transnational culture and her research has been featured in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, the Journal of Autoethnography, and Communication, Culture, and Critique. Durham is a former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Fellow (Brazil), The National Museum of African American History and Culture advisory board member for their hip hop anthology, and an Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography and Personal Narrative Research award recipient. She has also written public scholarship for news and entertainment outlets, such as Tampa Bay Times, NPR, and Haaretz.

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