Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Dr. Anna LaQuawn Hinton is an Assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. Dr. Hinton is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.” She...

A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow , Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with award-winning books including The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) . His work in critical theory and performance studies explo...

This is Fatima Seck and today’s discussion is with Dr. Danielle Roper , an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago from Kingston, Jamaica. She is also the curator of the digital exhibit: Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive .  She is from Kingston, Jamaica. In this conversation, we discuss...

This discussion is with Amber Jamilla Musser , a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center . She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensat...

This discussion is with Philip Janzen, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Florida. He studies the cultural and intellectual histories linking Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean , published by Duke University Press in 2025. His research has also appeared in the American Histor...

This episode includes discussions of suicide within the historical contexts of slavery, colonization, and empire. Please listen with care and be mindful of your well-being as you engage with this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis or struggling, you are not alone. Support is available through the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or by texting TALK to 741741 to reach the C...

This discussion is with Dr. Therí A. Pickens received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (P’05) and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA (2010).  She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. In today’s conversation, we discuss her debut poetry collection What Had Happened...

This discussion is with Dr. Jessie Cox , an Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the...

This discussion is with Dr. Devin Bryson and Dr. Molly Enz.     Dr. Bryson is a professor of French and Francophone studies and Gender and Women's studies in the global studies program at Illinois College. He has published work in Research in African Literatures , the Journal of the African Literature Association , Black Camera , and African Studies Review . His research focuses on the cultural, c...

This discussion is with Dr. Jody Benjamin , a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. He received his PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University in 2016. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the c...

This discussion is with Dr. Sandhya Shukla is associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia, where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. She is the author of India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a co-editor of Imaginin...

This discussion is with Dr. Laura Helton, a historian who writes about collections and how they shape our world. She is an Associate Professor of English and History at the University of Delaware, where she teaches African American literature, book history, archival studies, and public humanities. Her interest in the social history of archives arose from her earlier career as an archivist. She is...

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlanti...

This is Fatima Seck and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic t...

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlanti...

This discussion is with Dr. Bryan Sinche , a Professor and Chair of English at the University of Hartford. He has written more than twenty essays and reviews which appear in journals such as American Literary History, African American Review, ESQ , Legacy , and Biography and in collections published by Basic Books, Cambridge University Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press. He is also the e...

This discussion is with Professor Jenny Shaw , an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama where she teaches classes in the histories of the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, Comparative Slavery & Emancipation, and Early Modern Black Britain. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Geo...

This discussion is with Dr. Nana Osei-Kofi ,  (she/her) a Professor Emerita of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University. Her research centers on two primary lines of inquiry focused on justice and the politics of difference. One line examines structural shifts in higher education to promote equity and access, emphasizing curric...

This discussion is with Dr. Étienne Achille and Dr. Oana Panaïté . Dr. Achille is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Villanova University. His publications include the monograph Mythologies postcoloniales. Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (2018, co-authored with L. Moudileno;) and the volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020, co-ed...

This discussion is with Dr. Julia Hauser , a cultural historian interested in the entanglements of Europe, the US and Asia, mainly India and the Middle East, during the nineteenth and twentieth century. She has worked on female mission in late Ottoman Beirut, the entangled history of vegetarianism between Europe, the US, and India, and the global history of the plague. Her publications include Ger...

This discussion is with Dr. Imani D. Owens , an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.  She studies and teaches African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Studies at Princeton University, a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, and an NEH funded residency at...

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous re...

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous re...

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous re...

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous re...