Research

Kevin Mumford teaches courses in modern African-American history, the Civil Rights Movement, and Contemporary America in the Department of History and African-American Studies, and is Academic Coordinator for the Program in Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on race and social inequality, involving a set of intersecting themes in urbanization, sexuality formations, civil rights and political culture. His first book, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century helped to open inquiry into the mythical subject of “miscegenation” by uncovering vice investigation reports, newspaper accounts, sociological treatises and field notes, travel books and guides, and novels, that revealed an extensive and complicated underworld of black and white sexual encounters. The result was an interpretation that argued that race was at the center, rather than the margin, of the creation of modernism in the United States and abroad. Continuing inquiries into race and modernism include research on the queer racial liberalism of Carl Van Vechten; legal-sexual racism in Colonial America; and cultural and oral history of racial passing. The second research project follows African-Americans into the political machine and changing public sphere of Newark, New Jersey, from the days of caste-like Jim Crow to the grassroots activism of the Great Society to the polarization of urban rioting and Black Power in the post-Civil Rights era, and is forthcoming from New York University Press in 2007. The new research returns to the subject of the intersection of race and sexuality—from the vantage of new political narratives— by looking at the rise of a Black Gay Identity in Contemporary America. The topics in this book include the construction of homophobia in African American culture and thought; the biography of Joseph Beam, a pioneering black gay activist, and his relationship with Max Smith; government surveillance of black homosexual men, such as James Baldwin at home and in exile; and an analysis of the status of black gay men in the ongoing discursive overlap between civil rights and sexual equality since the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, overturning state miscegenation statutes.

Kevin Mumford is undertaking a new oral history project aimed at recovering the contributions of black gay, homosexual, or bisexual men to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Visit his website at http://www.myweb.uiowa.edu/kmumford/bgmhistory/ for additional information.

Kevin has received fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Research in Afro-American Culture at Harvard University; from Harvard Law School; from the Rockefeller Foundation; from the Black Atlantic Project of the Center for Historical Studies at Rutgers University; and the Schomburg Fellow, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, National Endowment for the Humanities. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1993. Professor Mumford is the current Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of History.