Associate Professor
Heritage Hall 360G
(205) 934-8693
Office Hours: Zoom by appointment
Education:
- B.A., University of Florida, History
- M.A., University of Chicago, Social Sciences
- Ph.D., Northwestern University, History
Andy Baer studies United States history and African American history. His research focuses on the intersection of race, policing, and social movements. His first book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. He is currently working on a second book manuscript, titled, The 1979 Boston Murders: Race, Gender, and the Movement to End Violence Against Women. Exploring the killings of 13 women and girls, 12 Black and one white, in 1979 Boston, the book explores the work of feminist activists, including the Combahee River Collective, to make the city—and the nation—safe for Black women and girls to live free from intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and more. Andy has a dual appointment in UAB's African American Studies program and also spent two years as a graduate fellow at the American Bar Foundation, an independent non-profit organization advancing scholarship on law and society.
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Recent Courses
- United States to 1877
- United States since 1877
- African American History Since 1877
- History of American Police
- Black Freedom Movements in the United States
- Graduate Seminar on Civil Rights and Black Power
- Graduate Seminar on Creating and Contesting Mass Incarceration in the United States
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Select Publications
- Andrew S. Baer. Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
- Andrew S. Baer, “#RahmRepNow: Social Media and the Campaign to Win Reparations for Chicago Police Torture Survivors, 2013-2015,” in Lucas Melgaco and Jeffrey Monaghan, ed., Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance (London: Routledge, 2018), 40-55.
- Andrew S. Baer, “The Men Who Lived Underground: The Chicago Police Torture Cases and the Problem of Quantifying Victims of Police Violence, 1970-2016,” Journal of Urban History, Vol. 44, Issue 2 (March 2018), 262-277.
- Andrew S. Baer, “Let Them Get Their Voices Out: The Death Row 10, Radical Abolitionists, and the Anti-Death Penalty Movement in Illinois, 1996-2011,” The Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 2017), 129-160.
- Andrew S. Baer, “Dignity Restoration and the Chicago Police Torture Reparations Ordinance,” Chicago Kent Law Review, Vol. 92, Issue 3, Symposium on Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration (Fall 2017), 769-792.