Episode 1––A Hundred Years of Black Horror: From Oscar Micheaux to Ryan Coogler
Dr. Alyssa Lopez, Assistant Professor of History, Providence College traces Black horror from the 1920s to Sinners and the tradition that made it possible.
Episode 2––Beyond the Genre of Man: Black Speculative Being in Sinners
Dr. Bernie Mendoza, Lecturer in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College explores what it means that both twins survive the film — but not as humans.
Episode 3––Feeling It Together: Black Horror, Affect, and the Body Genre.
Dr. Brittney Frantece, Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of African and African American Studies, Dartmouth College examines why horror is the genre that makes you feel Black experience, not just witness it. [Hosted by Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown]
Episode 4––Into the Messiness: Black Identity, Horror, and Disidentification in Sinners
Dr. Christopher S. Chambers unpacks the film's refusal to flatten Black identity into a single story — and why that refusal is itself a political act.
Episode 5––The Blues as Necessity: Liberation Dreams, Mortality, and Sinners"
Gabrielle Walker, Dartmouth College, Class of '28 reads the film through James Baldwin and her own research on what it means to find joy inside a world designed to contain you.
Episode 6––The Beautiful Night: Loss, Masculinity, and Black Southern Life in Sinners
The Beautiful Night: Loss, Masculinity, and Black Southern Life in Sinners." Kam Winston, Dartmouth College, Class of '26 traces the film's visual beauty, its debt to Gordon Parks's photography, and what Sinners does with the inheritance of Black masculine pain.
Episode 7––For Us, By Us: Sacred Space, Twinness, and the Dance of Sinners
Jénée Potts, Assistant Director, Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, Dartmouth College reflects on the scene where Pearl performs and an entire room becomes one body — and what Ryan Coogler gets exactly right about twins.
Episode 8––What We Carried Across: African Retentions, Diaspora, and Anti- Racist Visual Politics in Sinners
Dr. Reighan Gilliam, Associate Professor of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies, Dartmouth College shows how the film's music, dance, and healing practices document living African heritage in the American South.
Episode 9––The Rocky Road: Irish Gothic, Ancestral Memory, and Sinners
Dr. Kathryn O'Callaghan, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst examines why the vampire is Irish — and what that choice encodes about race, solidarity, and betrayal.
Episode 10––High John Was There Before the Lash Fell: Hoodoo, Horror, and Liberation in Sinners
Dr. Shelby Pumphrey, Assistant Professor of Africana and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Louisville explains the full depth of what Coogler put on screen in the film's opening minutes — the mythology of High John, the practice of divination, and a tradition of spiritual survival built under enslavement.