Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. Her scholarship traces how Black women experienced, theorized,
and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
United States. Khater is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Vanishing
Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape, which excavates the
significance of post-Emancipation fugitivity as a window into the evolving carceral state
and its geographies. Her scholarship has appeared in Southern Cultures and Disability
Studies Quarterly. Her article, “No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical
Epistolary of Disability” (DSQ Vol. 43, No. 1) 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.
Her teaching interests include: 19th and 20th-century African American History; Black
Feminist Studies; Carceral Studies; Disability Studies; Abolition Studies and Racial
Formation in Arabic-Speaking Communities
Books
Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape [manuscript
in progress]
Journal Articles
“No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability in
Early Twentieth-Century Alabama Prisons,” Disability Studies Quarterly, Special Issue on
Origins, Objects, Orientations: New Histories and Theories of Race and Disability (2023)
Winner – 2024 Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize, Black Women’s Studies
Association
“Riot and Reclamation: Black Women, Prison Labor, and Resistive Desires,” Southern
Cultures, Special Issue on The Abolitionist South (2021)
