Today’s conversation is with Joanna Davis-McElligatt, who teaches in the Department of English at University of North Texas. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on literature and graphic arts, she is the author of the forthcoming Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora (2026).In this conversation, we discuss the place of the Black literary tradition in the study of Black life, disciplinary limits and possibilities, and how comics, graphic arts, and aesthetic questions they raise expand the Black Studies imagination.