State Sanctioned
A clearinghouse for information, analysis, and resources related to state sanctioned violence in the United States
Scholars and Scholarship
Some content from this page has migrated to a new website! Please visit The Histories of Violence Collective page of resources to learn more about scholars and scholarship focusing on violence, including key texts, blogs & websites, archives & digital collections, and resources for teachers.
Learn more about individual scholars, and academic organizations, or browse by topic: Borderland & Migration — LGBTQ Studies — Lynching — Policing — Postcolonial Studies — Prison Studies — Riots — Settler-Colonialism and Native Studies — Sexual and Gender-Based Violence — Slavery
Scholars who Specialize in Violence
Kathleen Belew – 20th century US history, race, violence, veterans
Dan Berger – critical prison studies, political prisoners, social movements, media and culture
Ned Blackhawk – Native American and indigenous studies, western history, colonialism & violence
Colin Dayan – law, prison law, African American studies
Sarah Deer – law, tribal law, sexual and domestic violence
Stephen Dillon – prison studies, LGBTQ studies, political prisoners. anti-racist movements
Ruth Wilson Gilmore – critical prison studies, political geography, race and racism
Kali Gross – African American women’s history, criminal justice, theories of violence
Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez – borderlands history, transnational feminism, popular culture
Joy James – African American studies, critical prison studies, black feminist theory
Caren Kaplan – visual culture, militarization, gender studies
Jessie Kindig – US history, Asian American studies, war and violence, Korean War
Marisol LeBron – state violence, police violence, Puerto Rico.
Danielle McGuire – civil rights, African American women, racial and sexual violence
Sheila Smith McKoy – race riots, racial violence and peacemaking, American racism and its international exports
Nadine Naber – Arab and Muslim American studies, gender and sexuality, transnational feminism, state violence
Beth Ritchie – violence against women, prison and incarceration, race
Hannah Rosen – African American history, slavery & emancipation, US south, sexual violence
Balbir Singh – race and racial violence, South Asian diasporic politics, minority critique and philosophy
Eric Stanley – critical prison studies, trans studies, feminist theory
Emily Thuma – criminalization and imprisonment, gender race & sexuality, 20thc U.S. history
Jason Ward – lynching, racial violence, civil rights
Kidada Williams – slavery, racial violence, social trauma
Academic Organizations and Networks
American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies caucus
The Hampton Institute: A Working-Class Think Tank (see especially their Criminal Justice Department)
Histories of Violence Collective
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online – has numerous relevant discussion groups
Peace and Justice Studies Association
Guidotti-Hernandez, Nicole. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (2011) – Google Books, Amazon
Gender, LGBTQ & Sexuality Studies
Thuma, Emily, Lessons in Self-Defense, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fall/Winter 2015
Hanhardt, Christina,Safe Space, Duke Press, 2013, review in Jacobin Magazine, review in Project Muse
Reddy, Chandan, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State, Duke Press, 2011
Ritchie, Andrea, Joey Mogul and Kay Whitlock, Queer Injustice, (2011) – link goes to website, to purchase book go here
Stanley, Eric and Nat Smith (eds), Captive Genders, 2011 – link goes to blog. to purchase book go here
Lynching (see also Teaching About Lynching, and Learn More About Lynching)
Bailey, Tolnay, Beck, Laird. Targeting Lynch Victims: Social Marginality or Status Transgressions? American Sociological Review, 76.3 (2011)
Belew, Kathleen. Lynching and Power in the United States: Southern, Western, and National Vigilante Violence. History Compass 12.1, January 2014.
Brundage, Fitzhugh. The Darien ‘Insurrection’ of 1899: Black Protest during the Nadir of Race Relations, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 74.2 (Summer, 1990)
Finnegan, Terrance, A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina – Google Books, Amazon
Williams, Kidada, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation through WWI, NYU Press, 2012
LeBron, Marisol. Policing Solidarity: State Violence, Blackness, and the University of Puerto Rico Strikes. Souls, 17.1 (2015).
Embrick, David. Two Nations, Revisited: The Lynching of Black and Brown Bodies, Police Violence, and Racial Control in ‘Post-Racial’ Amerikkka, Critical Sociology, June 2015
Berger, Dan. Marilyn Buck’s Playlist, Polygraph 23/24 (2013)
Bush-Baskette, Stephanie. Misguided Justice: The War on Drugs and the Incarceration of Black Women, 2010 – Amazon
James, Joy. The New Abolitionists: Neo-Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, 2005. PDF: The New Abolitionists (Intro only) and States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (2002) – James on Amazon
McKoy, Sheila Smith. When Whites Riot: Writing, Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures. 2001. – Amazon
Settler-Colonialism and Native Studies
Robertson, Kimberly Dawn. Un-Settling Questions: The Construction of Indigeneity and Violence Against Native Women. Doctoral Thesis, UCLA. 2012.
Sexual and Gender-based Violence
McGuire, Danielle, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, Knopf, 2011
Rosen, Hannah, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South, University of North Caroline Press, 2009
Blackmon, Douglas, Slavery by Another Name: the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, 2009 – Amazon — see also film by PBS based on Blackmon’s research
Social Movements
Bloom, Joshua, Black Against Empire, UC Press, 2013 — see also an interview with Bloom in Viewpoint Magazine
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