Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas
About
Anne Gray Fischer is an assistant professor of women's history at University of Texas at Dallas, where her teaching and research focus on race, gender, and law enforcement in the twentieth-century US. Her prize-winning academic writing has appeared in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Social History, and she was written for popular audiences in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and Bitch Magazine.
Current Work:
When we talk about race and police power in the United States, the conversation usually revolves around Black men. But Black women-both as targets and protesters of police-have been central to the modern history of law enforcement in the urban US. Anne's scholarship illuminates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of contemporary urban police regimes. Ultimately, the sexual policing of Black women on city streets was crucial to the justification and enactment of "broken windows" policing, or mass misdemeanor arrest programs, which in turn enabled the gentrification of US cities. This project reorients our perspective on the consolidation of, and challenges to, state power in the twentieth-century US, while also delivering urgent context for the ongoing gender- and race-specific practices of mass policing in contemporary cities.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Race, gender, law enforcement, police, urban
