Donna Murch

Associate Professor of History

Ph.D., History, U.C. Berkeley, 2004

At Rutgers since 2004

311A Van Dyck Hall
848-932-8379
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RESEARCH INTERESTS

My scholarly interests include the urban history of California and New York; Civil Rights, Black Power and postwar social movements; history of policing and prisons; and the political economy of drugs.  Currently, I am researching the postwar history of the Bronx and completing a new book on youth culture and underground economy.   For the next two years (2010-2012), I will be serving as the co-director of the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA) and for the Black Atlantic Lecture Series.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

• 512:379  African American History II
• 506:401  Postwar Youth Culture From Hip Hop to Crack
• 506:401  Postwar America: Race, Identity and Policing
• 506:402  The Black Panther Party and American Social Movements
• 512: 364  History of Blacks in Urban America

Graduate

• 510: 561 History of the Long Sixties, U.S. Colloquium
• 510: 553 Problems and Directed Readings in African American History

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, University of North Carolina Press, October 2010
• “Mamie Phipps Clark: Black Women’s Organizing Tradition, Conceptions of Family, and the Contradictions of Elite Reform,” in Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (eds.) Mia Bay, Farah Griffin, Martha Jones, and Barbara Savage, forthcoming 2012
• “A Campus Where Black Power Won: Merritt College and the Hidden History of Oakland’s Black Panther Party, ” in Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, Peniel Joseph (ed.) Palgrave McMillan, December 2009 (reprint)
• “The Campus and the Street: Race, Migration, and the Origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA,” Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Fall 2007
• “The Prison of Popular Culture,” The Black Scholar, Spring 2003

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

• Narratives of Power: New Articulations of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Class
  Co-Director, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (2010-2012)
  Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

• Confronting the Carceral State: Policing and Punishment in Modern U.S. History
  Conference Organizer, March 2010
  Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

• Black Atlantic Lecture Series
  Director (2008-)
  Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

• Aresty Research Program
  Rutgers, State University of New Jersey
  Faculty Mentor

• The City and the Word: Urbanism and Oral History in the Historic and Modern African Diaspora
  Rutgers, State University of New Jersey
  Co-Founder (2005 – 2006)