Selected Research 

Recent project-related research on histories of racial violence, legacies, and reckoning.

Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science (v. 694 March 2021), Co-edited by David Cunningham, Hedy Lee, and Geoff Ward. 

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 (more) to commemorate and address legacies of this grave injustice, including the enduring problem of unequal protection through law.

Click titles to access

• David Cunningham, Hedwig Lee, and Geoff Ward, eds. (2021). “Legacies of Racial Violence: Clarifying and Addressing the Presence of the Past.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 
  
  
• Gaby, S., D. Cunningham, H. Lee, G. Ward, and A. Jackson (2021). "Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South." Socius  
  
  
• Geoff Ward, Nick Petersen, Aaron Kupchik, and James Pratt (2019). “Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Southern Schools.” Social Problems. 
  
  
• David Cunningham, Geoff Ward, and Peter Owens (2019). “Configuring Political Repression: Anti-Civil Rights Enforcement in Mississippi.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly.
  
  
• Pérez, Raul and Geoff Ward (2019). "From Insult to Estrangement and Injury: The Violence of Racist Police Jokes." American Behavioral Scientist.  
  
  
• Ward, Geoff (2018). "Living Histories of White Supremacist Policing: Towards Transformative Justice." Du Bois Review.
  
  
• Ward, Geoff (2016). "Microclimates of Racial Meaning: Historical Racial Violence and Environmental Impacts," Wisconsin Law Review.
  
  
• Owens, P., D. Cunningham, and Geoff Ward (2015). “Motivational and Organizational Contingencies of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan”
  ​Social Problems.
  
  
• Ward, Geoff and David Cunningham, eds. (2015). “Legacies of Racial Conflict & Violence.” Race & Justice (Special Issue).
  
  
• Petersen, Nick and Geoff Ward (2015). “The Transmission of Historical Racial Violence: Lynching, Civil Rights-Era Terror, & Contemporary Interracial Homicide.” Race & Justice.
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• Ward, Geoff (2015). “The Slow Violence of State Organized Race Crime.” Theoretical Criminology.
  
  
• Ward, Geoff (2012). The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice. University of Chicago Press.

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