Christopher Ouma Takes the Helm at Award-Winning Series "Left of Black"

Christopher Ouma doesn’t begin by talking about himself when asked about becoming the next host of Left of Black. Instead, he talks about its original host, Mark Anthony Neal.

Long before Ouma joined Duke—or even moved to the United States—he was familiar with Neal’s work. He admired the way Neal bridged rigorous scholarship with public intellectual life, creating conversations about Black culture that reached well beyond the university. As Ouma sees it, Neal was building a multimedia space “that interface[d] between the public world out there and the academy” before podcasts became the cultural fixtures they are today.

It’s also why Ouma is careful about describing what comes next.

“Mark Anthony Neal’s shoes are too big to fill,” he said.

What ultimately convinced him to take on the role was Neal’s own view that Left of Black had never been defined by a single host. The series had grown into something larger—a gathering place where scholarship, culture, and public conversation meet. Ouma prefers to think of it as a “commons,” a space where people can enter, engage with ideas about Black life from different perspectives, and carry those conversations with them after they leave.

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“I am thoroughly honored and humbled to be able to move the project a little bit forward and to contribute in my own way,” he said.

Mark Anthony Neal launched Left of Black in 2010 and spent the next 15 years building it into one of the most recognizable platforms for conversations about Black scholarship and culture. As Neal steps into his new role as chair of Duke’s Academic Council, Ouma will take the reins when the series returns for its seventeenth season in fall 2026.

Ouma joined Duke’s faculty in 2023 after teaching at the University of Cape Town. Raised in Kenya, he’s now an associate professor of English & African and African American Studies whose work focuses on Black print Cultures, specifically small magazines and Pan-African Imagination between Africa and its Black diasporas. He also co-directs the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute’s Black Archival Imagination Lab (BAIL) alongside Khwezi Mkhize.

That work has shaped the way Ouma thinks about Left of Black. His research traces the movement of Black ideas, histories and cultural memory across places like the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, expanding the show's global Black footprint.

“The platform itself is an archive,” he said.

Over the past 16 years, that archive has captured scholars grappling with some of the defining moments of the twenty-first century—from the 2008 financial crisis and the Obama presidency to Black Lives Matter, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of authoritarian politics.

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Ouma describes the collection as “an archive and a syllabus of global Blackness in the new millennium.” His role, he believes, is not only to preserve that record but to keep adding to it, recognizing that future viewers may return to these conversations with questions that haven’t yet been imagined.

His approach to preparation as an interviewer is refreshingly straightforward: he reads.

Before sitting down with a guest, Ouma reads each book cover to cover similar to Neal's own approach, paying attention not only to its central argument but also to what he calls its “ethical and political investments.” He’s interested in what scholarship does beyond the academy, from what it asks readers to notice, challenge, or reconsider.

“I really believe in reaching at the ethical and political investments of scholarship,” he said.

Rather than settling into a signature interviewing style, Ouma wants each conversation to be shaped by the work itself. That philosophy has already guided discussions ranging from Black college football players to the labor, surveillance, and commercial systems that exist behind the spectacle fans see on Saturdays. For him, those conversations reflect what Left of Black has always done best: connect academic research to questions that resonate far beyond the university.

The same perspective informs how Ouma thinks about “global Blackness.”

“It’s never a monolith,” he said.

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Ethnicity, nationality, and diaspora all offer different ways of understanding the Black experience, often pulling in different directions. At the same time, he argues, centering Black life doesn’t exclude larger conversations about capitalism, the environment, modernity, or the nation-state.

“We put it front and center, but it’s never an exclusion,” he said.

That conviction also explains why Ouma rejects the idea that Black Studies is simply about examining the past. He argues the field has always responded to “the present danger” created by the enduring legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and empire. Left of Black, with nearly two decades of conversations preserved online, offers a living record of that dialogue. As Ouma put it, “the past is never really past.”

For Ouma, leading the series isn’t about putting his own stamp on it or chasing relevance for its own sake. He sees the work as “a long-term ethical commitment and investment”—one rooted in a tradition of Black intellectual life that has always extended beyond university walls and remained accountable to broader communities.

“It’s not simply about relevance,” he said. “It’s about what is present.”