Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicholas Baham III.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was born and raised in San Francisco in a family where music, education, and Black culture were always important. My father was a classically trained clarinetist and a serious jazz listener, so music was part of my life from the beginning. I started playing classical guitar when I was eight and eventually moved into jazz, blues, rock, soul, and funk. That early exposure to music became one of the foundations for everything I would later do as a scholar, teacher, and writer.
My academic journey took me from the University of Chicago, where I studied Political Science, to Stanford University for a master’s degree in Anthropology, and ultimately to Indiana University, Bloomington, where I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology. Along the way, I became increasingly interested in the ways Black communities use religion, music, sexuality, art, and popular culture not simply as forms of expression, but as strategies for survival, resistance, and social change.
That work eventually brought me to California State University, East Bay, where I became a Professor of Ethnic Studies and am now serving as an Interim Associate Dean. Over the years, I’ve taught courses ranging from Black Sexualities, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin to Jazz Cultures, Afrofuturism, and racialized masculinities. I also helped develop our Genders & Sexualities in Communities of Color program. Teaching has always been central to my work because I see the classroom as a place where students can connect history and theory to the worlds they actually inhabit.
My scholarship has followed many of those same interests. My first major book, *The Coltrane Church: Apostles of Sound, Agents of Social Justice*, grew out of years of research on San Francisco’s Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church and my fascination with the intersection of jazz, spirituality, and social justice. I later co-authored *The Podcaster’s Dilemma: Decolonizing Podcasters in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism*, which expanded my work into media, technology, and the politics of who gets to tell stories in the digital age.
Eventually, though, I began thinking about how I could take the ideas I’d spent decades writing and teaching about and reach people outside the university. I’ve always loved detective fiction, and Oakland—where I’ve lived since the 1990s—seemed like a city that deserved its own contemporary noir tradition. It is beautiful, complicated, politically charged, culturally rich, and full of stories that don’t always make it into mainstream representations of the Bay Area.
That led me to write *The People’s Detective*, the first novel in my Sonny Trueheart mystery series. The book let me bring together many parts of my life: scholarship, activism, music, Black cultural studies, my love of Oakland, and my lifelong desire to tell stories. The novel deals with the disappearance and trafficking of young women of color in the Bay Area while also exploring race, class, policing, politics, corruption, and the enormous changes Oakland has undergone. The second novel in the series, She Sells Sanctuary, comes out in October 2026. In that novel, Sonny Trueheart and Aurora Jenkins investigate the brutal and senseless murders of unhoused people and provide security for a beautiful and charismatic leader of the Housing & Justice 4 All movement. It centers the urban class struggle for affordable housing and the criminality of corporate real estate oligopolies and corrupt city officials.
Today, I think of myself less as someone who moved from one career into another than as someone whose different interests finally converged. I’m a professor, administrator, scholar, musician, podcaster, and novelist, but all of those things are connected by the same basic question: Who gets to tell the story? Whether I’m standing in front of a classroom, managing student affairs and curriculum for the college, writing about John Coltrane, talking into a microphone, playing guitar, or writing a mystery novel, I’m interested in recovering stories and perspectives too often pushed to the margins—and finding ways to bring them to a larger audience.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely has not been a smooth road. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that a résumé can make a life look much more linear than it actually was. You see the degrees, the professorship, the books, and the accomplishments, but you don’t necessarily see the people who told you that you didn’t belong in the room—or the people who opened a door when someone else was trying to close it.
I grew up in San Francisco and was fortunate to come from a family that placed an enormous value on education, but I also learned very early that educational institutions don’t treat everyone equally. As a child, I had experiences in school that left me feeling isolated and misunderstood. Those experiences stayed with me, and much later they helped shape the kind of professor I wanted to become.
Graduate school brought another set of challenges. There were moments when institutional gatekeepers could have derailed my academic career altogether. At the same time, I was fortunate to encounter extraordinary mentors who did the opposite. People like Dr. Anya Peterson Royce or Halifu Osumare, when she was at Stanford University, used their positions and institutional power to advocate for me when I needed it. Other mentors created research opportunities, fellowships, intellectual communities, and sometimes very practical forms of support. Some people even made sure I was fed when money was tight, like Dr. Ronald Smith at Indiana University.
That contrast between **gatekeepers and liberators** has stayed with me throughout my career.
Academia can be a strange place because we’re taught to imagine success as an individual achievement. My experience has been almost exactly the opposite. I’ve succeeded because people created opportunities for me, defended me, mentored me, challenged me, and sometimes simply told me, “We want you here.” And I’ve also experienced what happens when people use institutional power to exclude rather than include.
Those experiences fundamentally shaped how I teach. I decided a long time ago that I didn’t want to be a gatekeeper. I wanted to be the professor who remembers that the person sitting across from me is a whole human being whose struggles may not appear on a transcript. That has meant teaching with compassion and grace, advocating for students, questioning traditional ideas about grading and academic success, and sometimes pushing against institutional practices that I believe are hurting the very students we’re supposed to serve.
There have been other struggles as well. Building a career around subjects like race, sexuality, Black religion, popular culture, hip hop, and social justice has sometimes meant working in areas that institutions don’t immediately recognize as legitimate or important. And more recently, moving from academic writing into fiction has required me to become a beginner again—to learn a completely different industry, face rejection, and figure out how to bring the concerns that have animated my scholarship into storytelling without simply turning a novel into an academic lecture.
But I think the difficult parts of the journey have also given my work its purpose. They taught me that success isn’t simply about getting through the gate. It’s about what you do once you’re on the other side. If you’ve gained some measure of power, access, or security, do you turn around and close the gate behind you—or do you hold it open for somebody else?
I’ve tried to build my career around holding it open.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My work has always lived at the intersection of scholarship, teaching, art, media, and social justice. I’m a Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay, but I’ve never thought of myself as someone whose work begins and ends inside the university.
As a scholar, I specialize broadly in African American Studies, with particular interests in Black religion and spirituality, music and popular culture, sexuality and gender, media, and the ways marginalized communities create cultural forms that allow them not only to survive but to imagine different possibilities for themselves.
I’m probably best known academically for my work on the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. My book, *The Coltrane Church: Apostles of Sound, Agents of Social Justice*, grew out of many years of ethnographic research with a remarkable community that transformed the music and spiritual legacy of John Coltrane into a religious practice and a commitment to social justice. That project brought together many of the things that have fascinated me throughout my life—Black music, spirituality, politics, community, and the power of art to transform people’s lives.
My work later expanded into digital media and podcasting. With Nolan Higdon, I co-authored *The Podcaster’s Dilemma: Decolonizing Podcasters in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism*, which examines podcasting, media power, surveillance capitalism, and the possibilities and limitations of supposedly democratized digital media. I’ve also spent years podcasting myself, so I’ve always been interested in putting theory into practice rather than simply observing media culture from a distance.
Teaching, though, may be the work I’m proudest of. I’ve spent decades teaching subjects including Malcolm X, James Baldwin, hip hop, jazz, Afrofuturism, Black sexuality, race and masculinity, and the broader histories and experiences of communities of color. I’ve also been involved in developing curriculum and programs that create intellectual space for subjects and students who historically haven’t always been welcomed into the academy.
My philosophy of teaching is deeply personal. I think professors have a choice about whether we’re going to function as gatekeepers or liberators. I’ve encountered both in my own education, and I’ve tried to become the latter. That means seeing students as whole human beings, teaching with compassion without sacrificing intellectual rigor, and understanding that sometimes our responsibility as educators is to advocate for students rather than simply evaluate them.
More recently, I’ve brought all of those interests into fiction. My Sonny Trueheart mystery series, beginning with *The People’s Detective* and continuing with “She Sells Sanctuary,” uses the detective novel to explore contemporary Oakland and the larger Bay Area. I’m fascinated by crime fiction because underneath the mystery there’s always another question: What kind of society produces this crime? That allows me to write about race, class, gentrification, policing, homelessness, political corruption, violence against women, and the contradictions of a region that can be extraordinarily progressive and extraordinarily unequal at the same time.
I think what sets me apart is that I don’t see scholarship, teaching, music, podcasting, activism, and fiction as separate activities. They’re different languages for asking many of the same questions.
Who gets heard? Who gets erased? Who gets protected? Who gets believed? Who gets to belong? And who gets to tell the story?
I’m especially proud that my career has allowed me to approach those questions in so many different ways. I’m proud of the books I’ve written and the scholarship I’ve produced, but I’m probably proudest of the students I’ve taught and mentored over the years. My own journey taught me how important it can be when someone with a little institutional power looks at you and says, “We want you here.” I’ve tried to provide that same sense of possibility for other people.
At this stage of my life, writing fiction feels like an expansion of that mission. It gives me an opportunity to take ideas I’ve spent decades thinking about in classrooms and academic writing and translate them into stories that can reach people who may never take an Ethnic Studies course or pick up an academic monograph.
Ultimately, that’s probably the thread connecting everything I do: I’m interested in telling stories that matter, preserving stories that might otherwise disappear, and creating spaces where people who have historically been treated as objects of other people’s stories can become the authors of their own.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Something that sometimes surprises people who primarily know me as a professor, scholar, or writer is that I’m also a guitar player.
I’ve played guitar since I was a kid. I started with classical guitar when I was about eight years old, but over time I gravitated toward the music I loved listening to—blues, jazz, rock, funk, and soul. Music has always been more than an academic interest for me. It’s another way that I understand the world.
For a number of years, I played guitar in a Bay Area blues band called Root Down. There’s something wonderfully grounding about playing the blues in a band. Academic life can involve spending enormous amounts of time in your own head—reading, writing, analyzing, theorizing. Playing music requires something completely different. You have to listen. You have to respond to what the other musicians are doing. And sometimes you have to stop thinking and just play.
I’ve also had the opportunity on occasion to play guitar with the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, which has a particularly special meaning for me. I spent years conducting ethnographic research with the Coltrane Church and eventually wrote *The Coltrane Church: Apostles of Sound, Agents of Social Justice*. Most people know that part of the story. Fewer people know that I’ve sometimes been able to put down the notebook, pick up the guitar, and participate in the music myself.
That experience probably says something larger about how I approach my work. I’ve never been particularly comfortable standing completely outside the cultures and communities I’m interested in and treating them simply as things to analyze. Music is embodied. Culture is embodied. Community is something you participate in.
And playing guitar has remained one of the places in my life where I don’t have to be Professor Baham or Dr. Baham or explain what something means. Sometimes I can just plug in, listen to the people around me, find the groove, and play.
I suspect there’s still a frustrated blues and jazz guitarist somewhere underneath the professor and novelist.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nicholasbaham.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctordredlocks/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557388851616
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-baham-iii-ph-d-a15b6820b/
- Other: https://chibur.wixsite.com/bootstrappublishing/nicholaslouisbaham
