Today’s conversation is with Michael Gillespie, who teaches in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Along with a number of scholarly essays and critical pieces in key journals and collections, he is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016), co-editor with Lisa Uddin of the groundbreaking art criticism collection Black One Shot, and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Pleasure, Ambivalence, and the Art of Blackness. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as a wide-frame for inquiry, the place of expressive culture in the field, and the particular challenges and gifts of cinema studies for work on Black life.