This is Ashley Newby 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 discussion is with Stacie McCormick, who teaches in the Department of English, Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research examines representations of the body, land, sexuality, and the ongoing resonance of slavery in contemporary Black writing and performance and she is the author of Staging Black Fugitivity and editor of a special issue of College Literature on the them of "Toni Morrison and Adaptation." In this conversation, we discuss gender, race, and the history of medicine, how issues arising from that intersection open important horizons in the field of Black Studies, and the persistence and insistent character of Black Studies as an area of study.