Dennis R Childs

Professor Childs received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. in African American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. His book, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary  (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), offers a cultural, legal, and political history of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century through the prison industrial complex.

 

Childs has received research fellowships through numerous sources including the Hellman Fund, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Program, and the Ford Foundation. Most recently he was Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, and a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship in African American Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.