Donna Murch

  • Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives

  • Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

  • Murch, Donna

    • Donna Murch
    • Donna Murch
    • Associate Professor of History
    • Degree: Ph.D., History, U.C. Berkeley, 2004
    • Rutgers : At Rutgers since 2004
    • Specialty: African-American and US History: Black Radicalism; History of Mass Incarceration
    • Click for Website
    • Office: 305 Van Dyck Hall
    • Phone: 848-932-8379

     

    RESEARCH INTERESTS

    Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and the former chapter president of the New Brunswick chapter of the Rutgers AAUP AFT from 2020 to 2024. In October 2010, Murch published Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Press, which won the Phillis Wheatley prize in December 2011. Her newest book, Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives was published by Haymarket Books in March 2022. Professor Murch is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Capitalism Plus Dope: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs in Los Angeles. She has written for the Sunday Washington Post, Guardian, New Republic, Nation, Boston Review, Jacobin, Black Scholar, Souls, the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American History, Perspectives and New Politics and appeared on PBS News Hour, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now, and in Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI.

    Link to my website: https://www.donnamurch.net/

    TEACHING

    Professor Murch teaches undergraduate courses in history methodology, black urban history, histories of the Movement for Black Lives/Black Lives Matter and on drug consumption and criminalization. She also teaches graduate research and writing courses and a colloquium entitled “Race, Criminalization and the Carceral State.”

    COURSESREGULARLY TAUGHT

    Undergraduate

    • 512:191  Black Lives Matter
    • 512:364  History of Blacks in Urban America
    • 506:401  Capitalism Plus Dope
    • 506:402  The Black Panther Party and American Social Movements

    Graduate

    • 510: 553 Problems and Directed Readings in African American History
    • 510: 561 History of the Long Sixties, U.S. Colloquium
    • 510:563  Race, Criminalization and the Carceral State, Af Am Colloquium
    • 510:563  The City in Fragments, U.S. Colloquium

    SELECTED PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA