University of Mississippi history professor, Garrett Felder, will begin a one-year fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchin’s Center for African and African American Research in September.

Felber is among 16 chosen fellows for this year. He will spend the year working on two book projects that include “We Are All Political Prisoners: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre” and “The Norfolk Plan: The Community Prison in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Both works will focus on different aspects of Felber’s primary research topic 20th century African American social movements. Black radicalism and efforts to reform or abolish prisons.

“I’m humbled and honored to be in community with such accomplished scholars of the African Diaspora and have space, resources, and time to pursue my next project, a biography of former political prisoner and revolutionary anarchist Martin Sostre,” Felber said.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, which was founded in 1975, annually grants up to 20 scholars from across the world to perform individual research at either the predoctoral or postdoctoral  level into an array of topics related to African and African American studies.

Due to COVID-19, Felber will be working remotely from Oregon.

Felber’s work has been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History and Souls.

He also served as lead organizer for the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference and is project director of the Parchman Oral History, a collaborative oral history, archival and documentary storytelling project on incarceration in Mississippi. He co-founded Liberation Literacy, an abolitionist collective inside and outside Oregon prisons and spearheaded the Prison Abolitionist Syllabus, a reading list published by Black Perspectives that highlighted and contextualized the prison strikes of 2016 and 2018.