Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. As an interdisciplinary historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century United States, Khater uses archival methodologies and critical theory to investigate
large paradigmatic questions about the relationship between slavery and prisons.
Khater is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Vanishing Points: Escape
after Slavery and the Collapse of Prison Borders (under contract with the University of
North Carolina Press), which interrogates a seemingly simple question: where did the
prison end and the outside world begin? Through deep archival analysis of incarcerated
Black women’s fugitive acts, Vanishing Points maps a long, post-slavery struggle over the
contravention of borders and the policing of Black mobility through containment and
encroachment. More broadly, Khater’s published and forthcoming work excavates
the meaning of abolition in its historically precise occurrences, both in the context of
slavery and prisons. Her writing has appeared in Southern Cultures’ 2021 special issue
on The Abolitionist South and Disability Studies Quarterly’s 2023 landmark issue on race.
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. An
award-winning teacher, Khater teaches courses on slavery, prisons, abolition,
disability, Black women’s history, and research methods.
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.
Books
Vanishing Points: Escape after Slavery and the Collapse of Prison Borders, (The
University of North Carolina Press, Forthcoming)
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)
