Geoff K. Ward

Geoff K. Ward

Professor of African and African American Studies
Director, WashU & Slavery Project,
Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2)

Faculty Affiliate in Sociology and American Culture Studies
PHD, Sociology, University of Michigan
BA, Sociology, Hampton University
research interests:
  • Legacies of Racial Violence
  • Representative Social Control
  • Youth Justice

contact info:

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    Campus Box 1109-0137-02
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Geoff Ward’s scholarship examines the haunting legacies of historical racial violence and implications for redress.

Geoff Ward is Professor of African and African American Studies and faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology and American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is director of the WashU & Slavery Project, a university initiative based in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2), in partnership with the consortium of Universities Studying Slavery. His scholarship examines histories and legacies of racialized violence and their reparative implications. This work has been generously supported by institutions including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to numerous research articles and essays, he is the author of The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an award-winning book on the contested history and haunting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice. 

Rooted in the black sociological tradition, Ward has been committed to an engaged academic practice. He combines scholarship with organizing and creative work including archives, exhibitions, and digital projects to engage broader audiences, support innovation in teaching, and facilitate the visibility, use and impact of his often collaborative research. He has served on the national advisory board for Monument Lab’s National Monument Audit, and is a member of the Mayor's Commemorative Landscape Taskforce in Clayton, MO, and the Reparative Justice Coalition of St. Louis, a network of volunteers working with Equal Justice Initiative to address legacies of racist violence in the region. He is collaborating with Prof. Anika Walke (History) to co-lead Memory for the Future in 2022, a reparative public humanities lab supported by the Redefining Doctoral Education Initiative of the Center for the Humanities. 


Recent publications:

Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past

Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science. v. 694 March 2021

Edited by David Cunningham, Hedy Lee, and Geoff Ward

Table of Contents
Introduction
Full Issue 

Cover image: The "Old Jail" in St. Louis where, in 1836, a free black man named Francis McIntosh was abducted and lynched by a white mob, whose crimes went unpunished. The editors are working with the Reparative Justice Coalition of St. Louis to commemorate and address legacies of this grave injustice.
 


Other recent publications:

  • Austin, R. et al. (2022). “Remembering St. Louis Individual—Structural Violence and Acute Bacterial Infections in a Historical Anatomical Collection.” Communications Biology, 5.  LINK
  • Ward, G. (2022). “Recognition, Repair & the Reconstruction of ‘Square One’” Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 155(1): 153-169. LINK
  • Gaby, S., D. Cunningham, H. Lee, G. Ward, and A. Jackson (2021). "Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South." Socius 7. LINK
  • Doering, Z. (2020). “From This Moment: Museum Futures. Conversations with Tom Freudenheim, Anika Walke, and Geoff Ward.” Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy 6(2): Museum-Politics-Management: 9-23. LINK
  • Ward, G., N. Petersen, A. Kupchik, and J. Pratt (2019). "Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools." Social Problems LINK
  • Cunningham, David, G. Ward and P. Owens (2019). "Configuring Political Repression: Anti-Civil Rights Enforcement in Mississippi." Mobilization: An International Quarterly LINK
  • Pérez, R. and Ward, G. (2019). "From Insult to Estrangement and Injury: The Violence of Racist Police Jokes." American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764219842617. LINK
  • Ward, G. (2018). "Living Histories of White Supremacist Policing," Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 15(1). LINK
  • Ward, G. and P. Hanink (2017). "Deliberating Racial Justice: Towards Racially Democratic Crime Control." In J. Jackson and J. Jacobs (eds.), Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics. New York: Routledge. LINK
  • Ward, G. (2016). "Microclimates of Racial Meaning: Historical Racial Violence and Environmental Impacts." Wisconsin Law Review, 575. LINK

For more about research in these and other areas visit my personal website. To access research articles visit my page on Academia.edu.


Selected creative projects:

  • Memory for the Future, a year-long "studiolab" combining study of the interlinked histories and legacies of colonialism, slavery, and genocide with the development of public humanities projects. 
  • Alternative Atlas of St. Louis, exploring new ways of thinking, seeing, being and thus making the greater St. Louis through fugitive mapping.
  • Monumental Anti-Racisma StoryMap exploring the racial politics of public memory, and highlighting global practices and student proposals centering anti-racist commemorative intervention.
  • The Racial Violence Archive, a digital resource for research, teaching, and engagement focusing on histories of racial violence and their legacies today. 
  • Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice, an exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and John M. Olin Library at Washington University (Spring 2020 and online).
  • Black Memory Worka StoryMap and podcast supporting the Spring 2020 Senior Seminar and Capstone in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

recent courses

Monumental Antiracism

This course examines the contentious racial politics of commemorative objects and practices, and theoretical and practical aspects of commemorative work as a strategy of anti-racism, through close readings of relevant texts, case studies, and a practicum component involving collaborative development of a memorial archive and student-led memorial design projects.

Juvenile Justice in the Black Experience

This course examines the socio-legal past, present, and future of American juvenile justice, with a focus on the black experience. The course is organized in three parts. Part I surveys the late 19th and early 20th century development of the "parental state," its institutional centerpiece (the juvenile court), and principle legal subjects ("dependents" and "delinquents"), as these took shape alongside the contemporaneous rise of 20th century American Apartheid (i.e., Jim Crow). Part II examines key changes and challenges in contemporary juvenile justice, centering transformations of this institution in the wake of the black freedom movement, and remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice in the post-Civil Rights Movement period. Finally, Part III considers possible futures of youth justice, and practical strategies for achieving equal protection within and beyond law.

    Histories of Racial Violence, Legacies, and Reckonings

    This course examines legacies of historical racial violence and contemporary reckoning efforts, with emphasis on the African American experience. The course combines seminar readings, discussion and academic writing on legacies of racial violence with a practicum component, where individual students and groups of students and faculty conceptualize and develop projects intended to clarify and disrupt legacies of racial violence, facilitating contemporary reckoning. The seminar and practicum explores and encourages a broad range of remedial efforts, including public policy measures, original research, archival development, commemorative efforts, and a related array of mediums, including visual art, design, film, digital projects, and other creative interventions.

      Memory for the Future

      Co-taught with Prof. Anika Walke (History), and supported through the RDE initiative in the Center for Humanities, this course leverages the concepts of multidirectional memory and reparative curatorial practice to develop new forms of humanities education and public humanities practice. This concept emphasizes the productivity of commemorating different, yet related histories of systematic violence such as the Holocaust, slavery, apartheid, genocide, and colonialism if/when they confront each other in the public sphere. Focusing on commemorative efforts through public memorials, monuments, archives, and museums, M4F blends a seminar (engaging related scholarship and acquiring practical and curatorial skills) and practicum where students and faculty work with area institutional and organizational partners to apply reparative curatorial practices.

      From our podcast:

      Hold That Thought Podcast

      Documenting racial violence

      In the Racial Violence Archive, Geoff Ward creates a commemorative space for reckoning with histories and legacies of racist violence in the U.S.