FEATURED AUTHOR
Dan Berger
I am an interdisciplinary historian focusing on critical race theory, twentieth century U.S. social movements, and critical prison studies. My research pursues a human accounting of how freedom and violence have shaped the United States in the twentieth century and continue to influence the world. Much of my work concerns the carceral state, including the diverse ways in which imprisonment has shaped social movements, racism, and American politics since World War II.
Subjects: Area Studies, History
Biography
Dan Berger is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington at Seattle. His work focuses on Black Studies, social movements, racism, and the carceral state in U.S. history.
Berger’s most recent book is Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, Justice, Power, and Politics series). Captive Nation documents the central role prisons played within the black freedom struggle between 1955 and 1980. It was awarded the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. With Toussaint Losier, he is the author of the forthcoming Rethinking the American Prison Movement (Routledge, 2017).
Berger is also the author of The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States (PM Press, 2014) and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006; also available in French [Editions L’Echappee, 2010] and German [Laika Verlag, 2011]), the editor of The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (Rutgers University Press, 2010), and the co-editor of Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005).
A committed public scholar Berger blogs regularly for Black Perspectives, and his articles have appeared in Al Jazeera America, Dissent, Salon, and Truthout, among elsewhere, as well as a variety of scholarly journals. He is a co-founder of Decarcerate PA, a campaign working to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania, and an active member of the Critical Prison Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association.
Berger graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida in 2003. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and held postdoctoral fellowships there and in the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He is a faculty associate of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the UW and sits on the advisory or editorial board of the journals Abolition, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and The Sixties.
On Twitter: Follow @authordanberger
Education
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University of Florida 2003; University of Pennsylvania, 2010
Books
