Oliver Baker

Professional Bio

Baker's areas of research include critical ethnic studies, nineteenth-century American literature, Black studies, Indigenous studies, and Labor and Working-Class history. 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 anti-colonial 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 from 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 community organizing work focused on community defense and anti-imperialism. Baker's published work can be found or is forthcoming in Mediations, Public: Art, Culture, Ideas, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Reviews in Cultural Theory, and Pyriscence.

Baker’s first book, No More Peace: Abolition War and Counterrevolution (University of California Press, February 2025) examines the lives, writings, and thought of abolitionist and anti-colonial rebels who engaged in wars of liberation to overturn slavery and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century America. The book 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, No More Peace shows how abolitionist and anti-colonial rebels developed insights about counterrevolution precisely through their militant confrontation with it. Unearthing these critical insights, the book 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.

Books