Mari Crabtree
Associate Professor, School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. Mari N. Crabtree is a writer and an associate professor of African American studies and African American history in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research blends Black studies, cultural studies, history, and literature. She seeks to excavate Black life beyond the binary of suffering or resistance by exploring how culture provides a lens for understanding the struggle for Black liberation, but also Black ingenuity, joy, and love.
Her book, My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, was published by Yale University Press as part of the New Directions in Narrative History series. She also has published essays in Raritan, Rethinking History, Contemporaries, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays titled Co-Opted: Essays on Black Studies and Ethical Praxis in the Age of Neoliberalism, and a monograph titled Guile: The Pleasures and Political Utility of Subversion in the African American Cultural Tradition.
Prior to Emerson, she was a visiting research scholar with Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies.
Courses
- African American History
- Africana Thought and Practice
- First Year Seminar: Cultural Constructions of Identity
- Advanced Topics in U.S. History
Academic Work
- 2022, My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 2023, “Lynching in the American Imagination: A Historiographical Reexamination.” In Reconstruction beyond 150: Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom, edited by Orville Vernon Burton and J. Brent Morris, 105–124. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
- 2021, “The Value of Integrating African American Archives into Undergraduate African American Studies Curricula.” In Ethnic Studies in Academic and Research Libraries, edited by Raymond Pun, Melissa Cardenas-Dow, and Kenya S. Flash, 27–42. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2021. [co-authored with Aaisha N. Haykal]
- 2021, “Stick to the Script?! No, Stick It to the Man!” Contemporaries
- 2020, “The Ethics of Writing History in the Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching.” Rethinking History 24, no. 3–4 (2020): 351–367.
- 2018, “The Art and Politics of Subterfuge in African American Culture.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 38, no. 1: 69?92.