Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.  During her twenty-six years at Rutgers, she has not only been a teacher but the codirector of "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender" project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (1997-99), a research professor at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (1999-2000), and chair of the history department (2000-03).

In November 2015, Rutgers University's Chancellor Edwards created the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History and named White as Chair. The Committee traced the university’s early history and its relationship with local African-American and Native-American communities.With active participation from students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty, staff, local historians, and librarians, the committee has conducted painstaking research to reexamine the university’s roots, including locating and studying the wills of Rutgers’ founders and benefactors and other archived documents. The result was the Scarlet and Black Project, which has produced two volumes related to Black and Native people's interaction with the university.

Professor White is the author of Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985). A second edition, with a new introduction and additional chapter, was issued in 1999. In anticipation of its anniversary, the Southern Historical Association celebrated it at its 2003 conference; and in 2005 a conference entitled "Slave Women's Lives: Twenty Years of 'Ar'n't I A Woman?' and More" was held at the Huntington Institute in California, with the proceedings published in the 2007 Winter issue of the Journal of African American Studies; the papers presented in honor of it at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women were published in the Journal of Women's History in July 2007.

Her other monographs are Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804-1860 (Oxford UP, 1996) and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (Norton, 1999). Professor Gray White contributed a number of articles to the Journal of American History, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Family History, and Journal of African American History. She is also the editor of Telling Histories: Black Women Historian in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and, with Darlene Clark Hine and others, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Oxford UP, 2004). She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, the ACLS, the American Association of University Women, and the National Research Council / Ford Foundation.

Selected Publications

• Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2008)
• Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999)
• Let My People Go: African American 1800-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999 [2nd ed])

In progress:

“’Can’t We All Just Get Along’: The Cultural Awakenings of the 1990’s” - This book recounts the history of the 1990’s through the lens of the decade’s mass marches and gatherings. The Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Promise Keepers, the LGBT Marches, and the Million Mom March tell us a lot about sexuality, and the state of American race, class, and gender relations. Separately, and in conversation with each other, they allow for an in-depth analysis of subjects like coalition building, intraracial and interracial faith, marriage and family relationships. In conversation with the past they speak to the continuing processes of millennialism and post-modernism. As such they are powerfully revelatory about American identity (ies) at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Due to university closure throughout the rest of the Spring semester, Geography in the Bluegrass Day has been cancelled

Due to university closure throughout the rest of the Spring semester, Naming and the Politics of Identity in Latinidad has been cancelled

This talk is concerned with processes of dispossession at the present historical conjuncture of racial capitalism in the United States. Conceptualizing Los Angeles as the post-colony, Roy demonstrates how police logics govern the relationship between property and personhood and produce geographies of racial banishment. She also foregrounds how housing and racial justice movements mobilize against such regimes of policing, creating and deploying frameworks of abolition and liberation.

Gay bars are failures for both queer and mainstream LGBT politics. They are too identitarian, normative, and capitalistic for the former, too frivolous and banal for the latter, and too exploitative for both. What little we know about gay bars comes in the context of gay neighborhoods or as backdrops for more interesting, transgressive performances. But gay bars exist primarily outside gayborhoods—there are more cities with lone gay bars than there are gay bars in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined.

This talk reports on the queerness of one of 52 gay bars I studied that are more than an hour’s drive from another. I argue that these “outpost” bars are queer places without queer politics, best conceived in relation to both the regions they serve and to big-city LGBT life: relatively cosmopolitan and dumpy, relatively un-capitalistic and Republican, relatively queer and apolitical. They are unique sites of convergence for the rural and urban, the cosmopolitan and provincial, tensions that can help extend the metronormative critique away from binaries or a rejection of “the” city. A reorientation towards places, rather than abstract spaces, helps make sense of what might otherwise seem surprising about the small-city lives of the majority of LGBT people: that the gay bars that fail most deeply at both queer and mainstream LGBT expectations might be the queerest places of all.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallizes violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects.Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanization inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human-anima binary through which processes of dehumanization are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centers empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialization and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de-anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice.