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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 Mary Hicks, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches the history of the Black Atlantic and Latin America. Her research has been published in Slavery & Abolition, Journal of Global Slavery, and a number of collections on slavery, the Atlantic world, and the meaning of Black history. She is the author of Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press. In this conversation, we discuss the past and future of Black Studies with particular attention to questions of language, everyday life as a form of resistance, and how the field of Black Studies calls us to rethink what we mean by archives and archival sources.

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