Oliver Baker

Professional Bio

Baker's areas of research include critical ethnic studies, nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Black studies, and Indigenous studies. He teaches courses on the relationship between nineteenth-century US literature and the histories of slavery, settler colonialism, and capitalism, class struggles and literature, the abolition movement, the African American novel, and decolonial theory. At the University of New Mexico where he received his PhD in American literary studies, Baker was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship. His research has emerged out of national seminars such as Cornell University's School of Criticism and Theory, the Newberry Library's National Consortium in American Indian Studies, Canada's Banff Research in Culture Program, and from community organizing work focused on mutual aid and anti-imperialism. Baker's published work can be found in Mediations, Public: Art, Culture, Ideas, Reviews in Cultural Theory, and Pyriscence.

Baker’s first book, No More Peace: Abolition War and Counterrevolution (forthcoming from University of California Press, February 2025) examines how those who waged abolition war to overthrow slavery theorized racial capitalism and its strategies for repressing resistance. No More Peace highlights how numerous insurrections, revolts, and armed campaigns of enslaved and colonized people advanced abolition war as the movement to win collective life over class society in North America. From this aim, abolition war became the motor force for constant white counterrevolution. Through historical analysis, literary critique, and theory, Baker shows how Black and Indigenous rebels developed insights about counterrevolution precisely through their militant confrontation with it. Unearthing these critical insights, Baker reveals how US capitalism was reproduced and expanded through the long history of white counterrevolution. Whiteness and settler colonialism developed as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous alliances formed across class difference to organize people to police or soldier for capitalism. No More Peace also spotlights moments of radical abolition and anticolonialism—particularly those of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and the Seminoles—that ruptured counterrevolution. Slavery and settler colonialism were always uncertain projects—vulnerable to defeat, collapse, and ruin by those who resisted.