Micah Khater

Assistant Professor

Office:
696 Social Sciences Building

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. She is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape, which which excavates the significance of postbellum 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,” published in DSQ won the 2024 Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize from the Black Women’s Studies Association.

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.

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)

“Riot and Reclamation: Black Women, Prison Labor, and Resistive Desires,” Southern Cultures, Special Issue on The Abolitionist South (2021)