Donelle Boose - Department of History and African American Studies Program, Randolph-Macon College

The Black Studies Podcast

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 Donelle Boose, who teaches in the Department of History and African American Studies Program at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. She is an historian who works between public history, archival research, and Black Studies sensibilities. In this conversation, we discuss the relation between public facing work and Black study, documentation and evidence in popular and academic historical writing, and the transformative nature of the Black Studies classroom.