EMPLOYMENT
Assistant Professor, History, and College of Letters of Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 2021-
Assistant Professor, History and African American Studies, The University of Iowa, August 2018 – June 2021
Founder and Director, African American Studies Program, Ball State University, August 2016 – May 2018
Assistant Professor, History, Ball State University, August 2015 – May 2018
EDUCATION
Ph.D., History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015
M.A., Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010
B.A. with Honors, History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005
SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
Fellowship, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, 2022-23
Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2021-22
Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2020-21
Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities, 2020-21
Andrew W. Mellon Academic Research Fellowship, The HistoryMakers, 2020 (summer)
Fellowship, Benjamin V. Cohen Peace Fund, 2017-18
Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipends, 2017 (summer)
Fellowship, Diversity Associate Fellowship Program, Ball State University, 2015-16
Fellowship, Doris G. Quinn Foundation, 2014-15
Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, 2012 (summer)
BOOKS
Winner of the Benjamin Hooks Institute’s National Book Award (best book on the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy)
Winner of the Union League Club of Chicago’s Book Award for the best book on the history of Chicago for the 2019-2020 biennium
White Innocents: Terror, Racism, and Innocence in the Making of Modern America (under contract with Liveright)
“I Am a Revolutionary”: The Political Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton (under contract with Haymarket Books)
Revisiting the Black Metropolis: New Histories of Black Chicago (edited volume with Erik Gellman and Marcia Walker-McWilliams, under contract with University of Illinois Press)
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
“White Innocents: On the Decriminalization of White Terrorism in America,” American Quarterly 74:3 (Sep. 2022): 615-622
“Police and Crime in the American City,” co-authored with Max Felker-Kantor, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, published May 18, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.56
“Racial Framing: Blackface Criminals in Jim Crow America” (in progress)
SELECTED NON-REFEREED WRITING
“How was the first January 6 hearing? Our panel weighs in.” The Guardian, June 10, 2022
“No, more police won’t make New Yorkers – or anyone else – safer. It never does.” The Guardian, April 19, 2022
“Policing’s History Argues Against Reform,” in The Long Year: A 2020 Reader, edited by Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022)
“Free as in Fred,” The Baffler no. 57 (May 2021)
“What ‘Defund the Police’ Really Means,” Washington Post, February 9, 2021
“How to Defund the Police,” Public Books, November 20, 2020
“The Blues of 1919: On History and Poetry,” Process: A Blog for American History, July 16, 2020
Occupied Territory: An Author’s Response, Black Perspectives, April 10, 2020
Author’s response culminating a week-long forum on Occupied Territory, hosted by the African American Intellectual History Society and
The Journal of Civil and Human Rights
“Why Police Cheered Trump’s Dark Speech,” Washington Post, July 31, 2017
“Chicago’s History of Stop-and-Frisk Laws Is a Warning,” TIME, September 2016
“Chicago’s Police Problem,” History News Network, November 2015
“Ferguson, Missouri: This Is Who We Are,” History News Network, August 2014
“Of Harlots and Hoodlums: Criminalization and Interracial Intimacy in Postwar Milwaukee,” Milwaukee County History Magazine 3:1 (Winter 2013-2014): 7-11
Winner of the Ogden Prize for best article published in Milwaukee County History Magazine, Milwaukee County Historical Society, May 2014
“The Gun that Trayvon Didn’t Carry,” The Washington Spectator, July 2013
“MLK’s Forgotten Plan to End Gun Violence in Chicago,” History News Network, July 2013
“Why We Still Need the Voting Rights Act,” History News Network, April 2013
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Gun Violence,” The Progressive, March 2013
SELECTED BOOK REVIEWS AND REVIEW ESSAYS
Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas, by Terry Anne Scoot, Journal of Southern History (forthcoming 2023)
“How Policing Black Women’s Bodies Built the Modern City,” essay for a forum on Anne Gray Fischer’s The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, jointly published online by Black Perspectives and The Journal of Urban History (forthcoming 2022), in print at The Journal of Urban History (forthcoming 2023)
Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920-1945, by Brandon T. Jett, American Historical Review (forthcoming 2022/3)
Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York, by Douglas J. Flowe, American Journal of Legal History 62:1 (March 2022): 129-132
The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903-1922, by David Bates, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 18:3 (September 2021): 156-158
“‘The Hired Enemies of This Population:’ Black New York, the NYPD, and the Fundamental Anti-Blackness of American Criminal Punishment,” Review essay on Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2019) and Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City York (New York: New York University Press, 2019), in The Journal of African American History 105:4 (Fall 2020): 694-700
City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965, by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, The Journal of African American History (forthcoming June 2020)
The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities, by Clayton Nall, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 49:4 (Spring 2019): 691-693
“Faith and Freedom in America’s Black Power Era,” Review essay on Faith in Black Power, by Kerry Pimblott (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2017) and Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966-1971, by Martin L. Deppe (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), in Reviews in American History 47:1 (March 2019): 111-118
Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago, by Brian McCammack, H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 9:3 (2019): 7-13
SELECTED RECENT INVITED LECTURES/PANELS (by institution)
2023
Rutgers University
2022
University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities
2021
Rutgers University
George Washington University
The Union League Club of Chicago
Temple University
Carnegie Mellon University
DePaul University
Southwestern University
The University of Illinois-Springfield
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
2020
James Madison’s Montpelier Center for the Constitution
Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University
University of Wisconsin-Madison Havens Wright Center
Stony Brook University
Arizona State University
Washington & Lee University
Indiana University
University of Rhode Island (postponed due to COVID-19)
University of Tennessee-Knoxville (postponed due to COVID-19)
Rhodes College (postponed due to COVID-19)
The Mayor of Chicago’s “Solutions Toward Ending Poverty” summit
University of Illinois-Chicago
University of Northern Iowa
Ball State University
The University of Chicago
Dominican University
MLK Day Commission of Appleton, Wisconsin
2019
New York University
Barnard College
The Chicago History Museum
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
The Newberry Library
The Mayor of Chicago’s 1919 Red Summer Commemoration
The Chicago Public Library (Harold Washington Library Center)
African American History Museum of Iowa
Chicago Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and Repair the World
SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS=
Chair and Commentor, “Emerging works in Policing and the Carceral State in the Late 20th Century,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles, CA, April 2023
Presenter, “The Intersection of Race and Policing,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles, CA, April 2023
Presenter, “White Innocents: Violence and the Decriminalization of White Terrorism in U.S. History,” Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting, El Paso, TX, March 2023
Chair and Commentor, “Defunding the Police: Historical Perspectives,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, January 2023
Chair and Commentor, “Carceral Chicago: Case Studies in Conforming with and Resisting the Carceral Apparatus in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 2022
Presenter, “‘Fight Racism with Solidarity: The Radical Solidarity of Fred Hampton,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 2022 [Panel withdrawn due to COVID-19]
Chair and Commenter, “Policing and Protest in 20th-Century U.S. Cities,” Biannual Meeting of the Urban History Association, Detroit, MI, October 2021 [Canceled due to COVID-19]
Chair, “Rethinking Community Policing in the United States,” Biannual Meeting of the Urban History Association, Detroit, MI, October 2021 [Canceled due to COVID-19]
Presenter, “Policing White Supremacy: Police Unions, City Politics, and Police Brutality: A Roundtable Discussion,” Labor and Working-Class History Association Annual Meeting, online, May 2021
Plenary Presenter, “Race, Policing, and Power in Chicago, 1919-2020,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Chicago, IL, April 2021
Presenter, “Carceral Studies: A State of the Field,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Chicago, IL, April 2021
Chair and Commenter, “Policing Social Movements in the Twentieth Century,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, D.C., April 2020 (Canceled due to COVID-19)
Presenter and Panel Organizer, “White Criminals, Blackface: Criminal Minstrelsy in America,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York, NY, January, 2020
Presenter, “Policing the City: Rethinking the Past and Future of American Policing,” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Honolulu, HI, November 2019 (Withdrew due to family emergency)
Presenter, “Rethinking Police Power and African American Resistance through the lens of Policing Los Angeles,” Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Charleston, SC, October 2019
Presenter, “Author-meets-critic: Simon Balto’s Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power,” Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Charleston, SC, October 2019
Presenter, Roundtable: “Historicizing Policing in Postwar America: The Perils, the Possibilities, and the Politics,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 2019
Presenter, Workshop: “Issues Affecting the Profession: How the OAH Can Help,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 2019
Presenter and Roundtable Organizer, “‘Chairman Fred Lives: The Life and Legacies of Fred Hampton, Illinois Black Panther Chairman,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, January, 2019
Presenter, Roundtable: “Arnold Hirsch: Assessing the Legacy of the Second Ghetto Thesis,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, January, 2019
Presenter, Roundtable: “The Legacy and Impact of Arnold Hirsch,” Biannual Meeting of the Urban History Association, Columbia, SC, Oct. 2018
Presenter, Roundtable: “New Directions in the History of Police and Cities,” Biannual Meeting of the Urban History Association, Columbia, SC, Oct. 2018
Presenter, Roundtable: “Rethinking Activism and Protest in 1960s and 1970s Chicago,” Biannual Meeting of the Urban History Association, Columbia, SC, Oct. 2018
Presenter, Roundtable: “Genealogies of Black Lives Matter,” Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Indianapolis, IN, Oct. 2018
Chair and Commenter, “Morals Law Enforcement and the Making of Twentieth-Century American Cities,” American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, Oct. 2017
Presenter, “Policing for the People: The Chicago Campaign for Community Control of Police and the Struggle for a More Humane Chicago,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, Jan. 2017
Presenter, “Order and Justice: Austerity, Anti-Radicalism, and the Purpose of Policing in Depression-era Black Chicago,” Biannual Meeting of the Urban History Association, Chicago, IL, Oct. 2016
Presenter, “Dopeville, USA: Political Corruption, Public Policy, and Black Drug Enclaves in the 1940s and 1950s,” Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Providence, Rhode Island, April 2016
Presenter, Roundtable: “Civil Rights Insurgencies in the Urban North,” Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Atlanta, GA, September 2015
Presenter, “Police-Community Relations and the Freedom Struggle in Chicago: The Jon Burge Torture Cases,” Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Memphis, TN, September 2014
Presenter, “‘One Hundred Years Too Soon’: James Baldwin and the Elusive Meanings of Freedom,” Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Jacksonville, FL, October 2013
Presenter and Panel Organizer, “‘The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me’: Policing, Space, and Race in World War II-Era Black Chicago,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 2013
Presenter, “‘Their Very Presence Is an Insult’: Rejecting the Police and Defending the Community in a Pre-Black Power Era,” “‘The Fire Every Time’ Conference: Reframing Black Power Across the Twentieth Century and Beyond,” Charleston, SC, September 2012
Presenter, “‘Every Decent Citizen’: Jazz, Sex, and Criminalizing Black Culture,” ‘Sounds of the City’ Pop Conference, New York University, New York, NY, March 2012