Racial Justice Initiative

Racial Justice Initiative Chair

Dr. David Ponton III

Office:  
Faculty Office Building
201 USF Willow Drive
Tampa, FL 33620
Email: dponton@usf.edu

Dr. David Ponton III is a social theorist and a historian of Afro-America and the twentieth century United States. Through his archival research and anti-disciplinary experiments, he challenges assumptions about the meaning and purpose of history in ways that are richly empirical and theoretically sophisticated. His research on segregation utilizes Afropessimism to destabilize our understanding of change, time, and redemption in the singular moment of black suffering. He is the author of Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History (University of Texas Press, 2024).

Selected Publications

“An Afropessimist, Antidisciplinary Rejoinder to History, Its Human, and Its Anti-Blackness,” Qui Parle https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-10052309.

“An Afropessimist Account of History,” History and Theory 61, no. 2 (June 2022), 219-241. http://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12261. 

“Private Matters in Public Spaces: Intimate Partner Violence against Black Women in Jim Crow Houston,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 39, no. 2 (June 2018). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/698453. 

“A Protracted War for Order: Police Violence in the Twentieth Century United States,” History Compass (May 2018). https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12453. “

“Clothed in Blue Flesh: Police Brutality and the Disciplining of Race, Gender, and the ‘Human,’” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (2016). https://muse.jhu.edu.