This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 Britt Rusert, who teaches in the Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and is Executive Editor of the
Massachusetts Review. Rusert is the author of
The Afric-American Picture Gallery: William J. Wilson’s Speculative Museum of Black Art (Duke, 2026) and
Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU, 2017). With Whitney Battle-Baptiste, she is co-editor of
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).
Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book. Another book-length project,
The Care Underground: Mutual Aid in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, is forthcoming from Verso.
Rusert holds a PhD in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University and a BA in English from Allegheny College. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She was a 2024-25 NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and a 2023-24 Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.