Research Expertise and Interest

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

Research Description

Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work traces how Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Grounded in Black feminist historical methodologies, Khater’s forthcoming book interrogates post-bellum fugitivity as a window into the evolving carceral project, which depended on the past even as it imagined—and moved—into the future. Her scholarship has been published, or is forthcoming, in Southern Cultures and Disability Studies Quarterly. 

Khater earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in African American Studies and History. In 2022, she was awarded the Prize Teaching Fellowship from Yale University for excellence in undergraduate education. Her research has been supported by 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; and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.