Dan Berger is a historian of activism, Black Power, and the carceral state. Berger is the author most recently of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, published by Basic Books. The book tells the globe-spanning story of Black Power in the 20th century through the lives of grassroots organizers Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons. He is currently writing an incarcerated people’s history entitled Prison: A History of the United States (under contract with Basic Books).
His previous books include Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, which won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001, co-edited with Emily Hobson; and Rethinking the American Prison Movement, co-authored with Toussaint Losier; a second edition, also co-authored with Alan Eladio Gomez, is under way.
A public scholar, Berger is the cofounder and curator of the Washington Prison History Project, a multimedia archive of prisoner activism and policy. He writes frequently for public media, including Black Perspectives, Boston Review, Dissent, Truthout, and the Washington Post, among elsewhere, and he has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. He serves on the advisory board of the American Prison Newspaper Project, which is digitizing and making publicly available prisoner-produced publications throughout US history, and the editorial board of the Justice, Power, and Politics book series at UNC Press. In 2011, he co-founded the Philadelphia-based grassroots coalition Decarcerate PA.
He is professor of comparative ethnic studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, where he previously co-directed the UWB Labor Studies Colloquium. He lives in Seattle by way of upstate New York, south Florida, and west Philadelphia.