Today’s conversation is with Robert J. Patterson, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at Georgetown University. Along with numerous scholarly essays in journals and edited collections, he is the author of Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality (2019) and Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture (2013), co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (2016), and editor of the award-winning Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights (2019). In this conversation, we discuss curriculum writing and Black Studies, historical research and Black study, and the place of cultural studies in the field.