Courtney Terry - Department of Black Studies, Portland State University

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 Courtney Terry, assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches and writes on the history of and resonance between literary and popular cultural figures around questions of race, class, and expressive life. She also serves as Director of Education for The Hip Hop Museum in Bronx, New York. In this conversation, we discuss the place of popular cultural studies in the field, the echos of forms of blackness across African American history, and how an interrogation of cultural production expands the living archive of Black Studies..