Earl Brooks - Department of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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 Earl Brooks, Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He teaches courses in sound studies, African American rhetorical traditions, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and composition. His recent book, On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press), examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music.

His work also appears in Sounding Out!, Rhetoric Review, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Langston Hughes Review, and College Composition and Communication. Brooks is also a proud alumnus of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, and he serves as a UMBC McNair Faculty Mentor and advisory board member. 

What is The Black Studies Podcast?

The Black Studies Podcast is 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.