Donna Murch

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

• Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, Haymarket Books, March 2022
• Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, California, University of North Carolina Press, October 2010
• Recent Interview with historian Barbara Ransby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iInE0_B3Rqk&t=2562s
• 2021: “Amazon Showed Us the Future of US Labor,” Guardian, April 27
• 2019: “An Historian’s Claims About Martin Luther King Are Shocking – And Irresponsible,” Guardian, June 8
• 2019: “Racial Capitalism, the Opioid Crisis and the Problem Next Door,” Special Issue of Boston Review, Forum, May