Sara E. Johnson - Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego

The Black Studies Podcast

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 conversation is with Sara E. Johnson, who teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is a literary historian who specializes in cultural production of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century Caribbean across linguistic and imperial boundaries. She co-directed the UCSD Black Studies Project from 2021-2025. Her most recent book, Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (2023), works with archival fragments to center the world of enslaved knowledge production that made Moreau’s research life and academic fame possible. It was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, along with prizes from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Historical Association (AHA), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and the French Colonial Historical Society. Her first book, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (2012) is an inter-disciplinary study that explored how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. The book traces expressions of transcolonial black politics in places including Hispaniola, Louisiana, Jamaica, and Cuba, through forms including performance idioms and early black newspapers. Johnson is also the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (2006) and Una ventana a Cuba y los Estudios cubanos (2010).