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

Sociologists for Justice

Borderlands & Migration

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

Policing

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

Postcolonial Studies

Prison Studies

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

Riots

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

Slavery

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