History Book Club Presents Yalile Suriel & Tracey Deutsch
About the book
Cops on Campus: Rethinking Safety and Confronting Police Violence
University of Washington Press, February 2024
Over the last five years, headlines have thrust campus police departments from relative obscurity into the national spotlight. Campus constituents have called for campus police, as a tangible manifestation of the War on Crime within the sphere of higher education, to be disarmed, defunded, and abolished.
Using a multidisciplinary approach that draws from history, American studies, ethnic studies, criminology, higher education, and sociology, Cops on Campus provides critical perspectives on the organization and social consequences of campus policing. Chapters uncover details of the structure and culture of university police—some of the best-funded and largest private police forces in the nation—and examine the institution in relation to racialized and gendered violence, racial profiling, and the surveillance of marginalized communities on and off campus. The volume also features interviews with students, staff, and faculty activists to showcase efforts to redefine and reimagine campus safety and explore alternatives for the future.
About the hosts
Yalile Suriel
Yalile Suriel is an assistant professor of universities and power. Her research explores the intersections between the histories of higher education and carcerality in order to better understand how institutions of higher learning have shaped power relations within and beyond the institution. She is currently working on two book projects: one focused on the histories of student activism and the various institutional responses to it between 1960 and 1990. The second book project examines the lives and experiences of custodial staff in higher education throughout the mid-19th and 20th centuries.
Tracey Deutsch
Tracey Deutsch's current project uses the life of Julia Child to ask how and why food, especially gourmet food, became so central to mid-20th-century American life and politics. She has also written about the emergence of supermarkets (Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Government, and American Grocery Stores, 1919-1968) and has published essays on food and labor in The Oxford Handbook of Food History and Radical History Review.