This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Ed Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia, where he also holds an affiliation with the faculty of Creative Writing. In addition to a series of scholarly and popular essays, he is the author of a number of books and poetry collections, including most recently Call it in the Air (2022), Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes (2021), and is currently composing an intellectual biography of James Baldwin rooted in newly discovered archival materials. In this conversation, we discuss the relation between music and literature in the Black Studies tradition, the place of community in the formal and everyday practice of Black study, and importance of conversation, critical work, and creative expression.