Histories of Policing and Carcerality
As the scholarship on policing and carcerality continues to grow and generate a multitude of questions, the need to do this work in community becomes ever more apparent. As such, the History Department at the University of Minnesota has recently invited applications to our graduate program for a thematic cohort centered on the histories of policing and carcerality. We define this theme broadly to include students with interests across geography and chronology, including all regions of the globe and early modern and pre-modern antecedents to modern law enforcement and the carceral state. Although we are no longer specifically recruiting students for this thematic cohort, we will continue to support work that speaks to the expanding historiography on ancient, medieval, and early modern forms of crime, investigation, and punishment. We also support PhD research projects that think about how the concept of carcerality worked in settler colonial societies, colonial, and postcolonial societies and who are interested in exploring carcerality in relation to gender, class, ability, race/ethnicity, religion, etc.
Among our agendas is to collectively think about how to push the vibrant interdisciplinary field of carceral studies to be more transnational. We hope that with these histories we can be better equipped to think about the present and future. Another is to examine whether current case studies can propose solutions to the problems of policing. Can we imagine a form of law enforcement outside the histories of class conflict, enslavement, and imperialism? These questions lie at the root of contemporary debates over policing.
Students in our department have the opportunity to work with a growing cluster of faculty interested in varying aspects of policing and carcerality in the United States, Mexico and Central America, Africa, and Europe. Among our core faculty: Susanna Blumenthal offers law and graduate courses on Criminal Law, US Legal History, and Abolition and the Carceral State; Anna Clark teaches the history of human rights and researches carcerality more generally in institutions such as workhouses and hospitals in the 19th century imperial context; Aaron Hall teaches courses on the history of American slavery; William Jones offers a graduate seminar on Race and Class in the U.S; Patrick McNamara teaches on the history of the Drug Wars in Latin America and works closely with asylum seekers often held in detention; Michelle Phelps offers a graduate course in Sociology on Race, Crime and Punishment; Joe Soss teaches courses on the politics of public affairs; Yalile Suriel teaches courses on the history of policing and surveillance as well as on student activism. Other history faculty with related interests include Sarah Chambers in Latin American History, Katharine Gerbner in Early American History, Kevin Murphy in Public History, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick in African history, and Kathryn Reyerson in Medieval Europe.
Doing this work within the community of the University of Minnesota (and from a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches in an array of disciplines and perspectives) is particularly fitting given the worldwide attention focused on Minneapolis in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Minneapolis is a place of vibrant activism and is currently at the very center of conversations around the topics of police reform and abolition. Much of this local organizing has been accompanied by a dedication to recording and archiving the work in academic and online archival spaces. Additionally, groups such as Minnesota Transform and additional collaborations between Yalile Suriel and archivist Ellen Holt-Werle under the initiative of ‘Universities and Power’ have served as spaces to think about the implications of all this organizing for universities, their security apparatus, and ultimately to examine the role that universities can play going forward.
We hope you will consider joining our department in this or in one of its many other specializations. Potential applicants are encouraged to contact faculty in their geographic or chronological fields or the Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department, Professor Helena Pohlandt-McCormick.
