New Podcast Explores Past, Present & Future of Black Studies

Ashley Newby and John Drabinski Rolled Out “The Black Studies Podcast” this Summer, with $100K in Support from the Mellon Foundation

Most of the country’s African American studies departments celebrated their 50th anniversaries in 2020—or they would have, had COVID-19 not happened.

John Drabinski, a professor in the University of Maryland’s English and African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) departments, had to cancel his plans; a large, symposium-style event to honor the founding of Amherst College’s Black Studies Department, where he was teaching at the time. But he held on to that desire to highlight how far the field has come, and is now doing so with AAAS colleague Ashley Newby via “The Black Studies Podcast.”

Supported by a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, “The Black Studies Podcast” features a series of conversations between Drabinski, Newby and scholars of the field who hail from institutions located from one coast to the next—from Princeton University in New Jersey, to the University of California, Los Angeles. Each share stories of what got them initially interested in the field, how that interest materialized during the course of their academic career, and discuss how that has shaped what the field is today.

“Today, you have a not insignificant number of people with Ph.D.s in the field; Ashley is one of them. But you also have people with different Ph.D.s in the field—say English, or philosophy or history—who identify as Black Studies scholars. That’s me,” said Drabinski, who also co-hosts the “Conversations in Atlantic Theory” podcast. “That changes things, because there are now doctoral students and professors who spent their formative intellectual years in Black Studies rather than coming to it as a way of doing their disciplinary work, and so the field has really changed from what was originally largely history based; Black history was Black Studies at one time.”

The co-hosts say that while the podcast has been a great way for scholars to reflect on their careers and hypothesize on where the field is headed next, its contents can also be of interest to a broader—and perhaps much younger—audience.

“My 11-year-old daughter has been listening to it, so I think the podcast is very accessible,” said Newby, a lecturer and the AAAS director of undergraduate studies. “Through the interviews, listeners can learn about the different ways that people who work in the field think about that work and the way that it intersects not just with other academic disciplines, but with society as a whole, and the impact that that can have.”

Newby and Drabinski currently release one to two podcast episodes per week, and plan to do so through the spring of 2025.

The co-hosts are also planning to launch a research-focused speaker series with AAAS this fall, and a spring symposium that will allow students from Black Studies departments throughout the DMV to come to UMD to present their work, then witness scholars of the field do the same.

“I see the symposium as further fulfilling the purpose of the Mellon Foundation grant, which is reckoning with multiple generations of thinking about Black Studies, and connecting people across generations,” said Drabinski.

Listen to “The Black Studies Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and YouTube, or subscribe to the series on Substack.

Published on Tue, Aug 20, 2024 - 11:06AM