Carl SuddlerAssociate Professor
Carl Suddler, Associate Professor (B.A., The University of Delaware; Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington). Twentieth-century U.S. history; African American history; histories of crime and punishment; the carceral state; sport history.
Carl Suddler is an associate professor of history at Emory University. His publications, teaching, and public scholarship have placed him among a small number of African American scholars who study the intersections of Black life, crime, and sports since the late nineteenth century. Suddler’s first book, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (2019) is widely used in college and graduate classrooms across the country. He joined historians of the American carceral state who have produced a burgeoning wave of literature on criminalization, law enforcement, and imprisonment in America from the eras of slavery and settler colonialism to the modern age of mass incarceration and global counterinsurgency.
Along with his monograph, Suddler has published works that have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, American Studies Journal, Journal of Sports History; in 2020, he edited a special issue of The American Historian magazine that historically contextualized the global protests that occurred in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; and in 2021, Suddler worked with Harvard University’s Global Sports Initiative to help professional athletes become more informed on how to maximize their platforms to contribute to social justice efforts across the globe. With his recent op-eds and articles in outlets such as the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, HuffPost, and Brookings Institute, Suddler has built a name for himself outside of the academy. His expertise is in high demand from scholarly communities and media outlets such as CNN, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Black News Channel, and NPR.
In addition to a number of public-facing projects, Suddler is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled No Way Out: The Carceral Boundaries of Race and Sports, which uncovers the hidden fingerprints of police power in sports over the past 150 years and tells the stories of how Black athletes have been forced to navigate the constantly growing police presence in their daily lives.
Education
- B.A., History and Black American Studies, the University of Delaware
- Ph.D., History, Indiana University, Bloomington
Interests
- Twentieth-century U.S. history
- African American history
- Histories of crime and punishment
- The carceral state
- Sport history
Current Graduate Students
