The Race and Regency Pod works as a dynamic sonic space to lend an ear to all things Race and Regency. Using the intimacy, accessibility, and fluidity of the medium, this podcast brings together the public, artists, curators, librarians, scholars, and cultural critics who share their passion for questions of race in this period. Unlike ideas and engagements that can often stay confined behind academic paywalls, this podcast facilitates space for community members, and connoisseurs of the Regency era to think together and build together.

Listening with and to a range of people who speak in varied accents and tones, The Race and Regency Pod works as a practice in embodied scholarship. We imagine what enthusiasm and engagement sound like when directed towards sharing, community building, resistance, and self-expression. This podcast will house diverse conversations that expand the conception of the Regency era thematically, geographically, and temporally, by considering how we inherit formulations of race from this period and engage with them now.

Episodes

1. The Lab and the Pod with Dr. Patricia Matthew

In this episode, we are joined by the director of the Race and Regency Lab Dr. Patricia Matthew, who is an Associate Professor of English, Montclair State University. We talk about the vision behind The Race and Regency Lab and what we hope to accomplish with The Race and Regency Pod. Join us to discuss all things regency and race!

2. Austen, Race and Regency with Dr. Devoney Looser

We are joined by Dr. Devoney Looser, a writer and professor at Arizona State University. Devoney talks about her new book, Wild for Austen (Macmillan), which honors and explores Austen's writings, life, and legacy, just in time for the celebration of her 250th birthday on December 16. 2025!

Dr. Devoney Looser has worked on nine books, written essays in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, The TLS, and the Washington Post, and spoken about Austen on several platforms including CNN. She has received several recognitions including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

To learn more about Dr. Devoney Looser, visit her website.

3. Reflecting on the Romantic Archive with Dr. Mathelinda Nabugodi

We are joined by Dr. Mathelinda Nabugodi. She is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. She has previously held post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge and Newcastle, including in the literary archive at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic (2023) and one of the editors on the six-volume Longman edition of The Poems of Shelley (1989-2024). Her latest book, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, which came out only a few months ago, explores the connections between British Romanticism and the Black Atlantic.

In its deeply erudite yet personal engagement with the archive of romanticism, Mathelinda, in this book, offers us radically new reading methods that are rooted in a conscious engagement with the events in this period, while also redefining what it means to take pleasure in reading literature marred by violence. 

To learn more about Mathelinda Nabugodi's book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/719891/the-trembling-hand-by-mathelinda-nabugodi/

4. Sweet Taste of Empire with Dr. Kim F. Hall

Today, we are joined by Dr. Kim Hall, who is Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Professor Hall's research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities. She was born in Baltimore and holds a doctorate in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.  

Her first book, Things of Darkness, was published in 1996 by Cornell University Press. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts(Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, was published in 2006). In this podcast she talks to us about her most recent book Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo-Caribbean, which examines the roles of race, aesthetics and gender in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century.  She is also an avid quilter who was named “Quilter of the Month” at the Seminole Sampler Quilt Shop in Baltimore, Maryland.

In this episode, she will also tell us about the “Weaving Dreams” Exhibition at Barnard College that showcases handmade quilts and other textile artifacts selected from the Dr. Hall’s oeuvre of quilt art.

5. Ornamental Blackness with Dr. Adrienne Childs

Today we are joined by Dr. Adrienne Childs. Dr. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC where she served as co-curator of the special exhibit Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest (June—September 2025). She co-curated the exhibit The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture at The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England and co-edited Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge Press, 2014). In April 2022, The High Museum of Art awarded Childs The Driskell Prize in recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history. In this episode, Dr. Childs discusses her new book Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts (Yale University Press, 2025). She also discusses some of her current and future projects with us. 

For more on Dr. Childs’ work, see her website https://www.adriennelchilds.com/

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This podcast is produced and hosted by Shruti Jain. She is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Binghamton University, SUNY. Her dissertation is interested in the entanglements of Race and Caste in Enlightenment culture. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Public Humanities. In addition to her work in British studies, she works on community engaged public humanities projects. She hosts and produces podcasts like Immigrants Wake America, Confluence: Humanities in the Public Sphere, and contributes to the New Books Network. She is currently editing a section and co-writing a chapter for the Handbook of Humanities Podcasting (forthcoming).