Common Ground

In this episode, we hear from Keisha Blain, a professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, senior blog editor at the African American Intellectual History Society, and editor of the Global Black History section of "Public Books." Keisha Blain has, as much as any scholar, redefined what it means to be a publically engaged academic in the 21st century. She’s senior blog editor at the African American Intellectual History Society, and has contributed significantly to the fast rise in significance and influence of that organization among historians and folks interested in the history of African American thought. She is also one of the co-founders of the #Charelstonsyllabus, a movement on Twitter that offered a detailed reading list, crowdsourced among historians, to offer a detailed history of racial violence in the US. That syllabus drew a ton of attention, at the New York Times and elsewhere. We talk about Charleston syllabus, as well as the Trump 2.0 syllabus, which Blain also co-authored. We also d