Department of History

Sam Washington (he/they) is a 20th-century US historian, focusing on Black, queer, and carceral studies. His research examines the District of Columbia during the post-civil rights landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s, using the methods of carceral and black feminist studies to understand how the bodies of Black youth and discourses of hetero-masculinity became contested ground in the struggle over Home Rule. Through the use of oral histories and subversive readings of state documents, he also develops a counter-archive of Black queer care and resistance to carceral violence.