Today’s conversation is with Nicosia Shakes, who teaches in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Merced. In addition to essays in edited collections and journals such as Cultural Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Black Scholar, the CLR James Journal, SX Salon, she is the author of Women’s Activist Theatre in Jamaica and South Africa: Gender, Race, and Performance Space (2023), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. In this conversation, we discuss Black Studies as an activist discipline, the importance of transnational, comparative work, and the demands of multidisciplinary research and study.