Deirdre Cooper Owens - Department of History and Africana Studies Institute, University of Connecticut

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 Deirdre Cooper Owens, who teaches in the Department of History with an appointment in the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. In addition to a number of scholarly and public scholarship writings, Cooper Owens is the author of the immensely important book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, published by University of Georgia Press in 2018. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies from the perspective of race and gender history and historical writing, the question of sources and source material for such writing, and how the study of Black life speaks to the future of intellectual and cultural life in a time of political crisis.