The Past and Future of Black Studies

Department of African American and Africana Studies

University of Maryland

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 between myself and my collaborator on this project, John Drabinski. As colleagues in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Maryland, we share a deep commitment to the field and in the inaugural conversation of this series, we explore what we find so engaging about the area of study, what is compelling about its past, and what we hope to see as part of its future.

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