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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 Neil Roberts, Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. Along with numerous articles in academic journals, he is the author of Freedom as Marronage (2015) and editor or co-editor of Creolizing Rousseau (2014), Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), and A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018). In this conversation, we discuss the place in Caribbean history and thought in Black Studies, the complexity of thinking freedom in the Black Atlantic world, and the challenges that have come with the institutionalization of the field.

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