Research Bio

Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches about and researches the entwined histories of slavery and prisons, Black disability studies, and African American history. Specifically, her research traces Black women's relationship to fugitivity and escape in the context of enslavement and in the aftermath of its abolition. Through Black feminist theory and archival reading methods, she uses a wide variety of historical documents to excavate the ways that Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted carceral regimes in the twentieth century United States. Khater is currently at work on her first book, which is tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape. The book details the significance of fugitivity even after the end of slavery as a window into the way the prison system evolved over the course of the twentieth century and how Black women's attempts to escape different iterations of prisons affected the geographic scope of carceral infrastructure. Her scholarship has appeared in SouthernCultures and Disability Studies Quarterly and her article, “No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability” published in the latter won the 2024 Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize from the Black Women’s Studies Association and was featured on the podcast Death Panel.

Khater earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in African American Studies and History where she was awarded the Prize Teaching Fellowship for excellence in undergraduate education. Her research has been supported by the Society of Hellman Fellows; the Townsend Center for the Humanities; the Center for Engaged Scholarship; the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and other grants.

 

Research Expertise and Interest

African American history, Black feminist theory, carceral studies, disability studies, racial formation in Arabic-speaking communities