RESEARCH INTERESTS
Professor Donna Murch’s teaching and research specializations are historical studies of mass incarceration/war on drugs, Black Power and Civil Rights, California, social movements, and postwar U.S. cities. She is currently completing a new trade press book entitled Crack in Los Angeles: Policing the Crisis and the War on Drugs, which explores the militarization of law enforcement, the social history of drug consumption and sale, and the political economy of mass incarceration in late twentieth century California.
In October 2010, Murch published the award-winning monograph 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. She has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, OAH Magazine of History, Black Scholar, Souls, Perspectives, New Politics, and Jacobin.
The award winning film maker Stanley Nelson’s Black Panther Party documentary, “Vanguard of the Revolution” featured her research and Murch’s recent essay, “Ferguson’s Inheritance,” on the historical continuities between the Watts rebellion and protests in the St. Louis metro area reached a broader audience beyond traditional academic venues. In addition to appearing in more popular publications, Murch co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Urban History on mass incarceration and urban spaces for the September 2015 issue. While working on a new book on the Reagan Era drug war in Los Angeles, Professor Murch is also completing an edited volume on the late twentieth carceral state entitled Challenging Punishment: Race and the War on Drugs.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT
Undergraduate
- 512:322 Drugs: A Social History
- 512:364 History of Blacks in Urban America
- 512:379 African American History II
- 506:401 Postwar Youth Culture From Hip Hop to Crack
- 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
- “Ferguson’s Inheritance,” Jacobin, August 5, 2015
- “Crack in Los Angeles: Militarization, Crisis, and the Late Twentieth Century War on Drugs,” Journal of American History, July 2015
- “The Many Meanings of Watts: Black Power, Wattstax, and the Carceral State,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, January 2012
- “Countering Subversion: Black Panther Scholarship, Popular History, and the Richard Aoki Controversy,” American Historical Association, Perspectives on History, October 2012
- Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, University of North Carolina Press, October 2010
- “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
- Co-Director of the Urban History Association Annual Conference, 2016
- 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 (2008-2013)
Rutgers, State University of New Jersey
- Aresty Research Program
Rutgers, State University of New Jersey
Faculty Mentor
