Keith Mayes
Chair and Professor
Keith Mayes, Professor. Professor Mayes (Ph.D. in History, Princeton University) examines the narrative construction of reality and how African Americans have found ways to resist impositions of white meaning and emplotment. Mayes’ area of research is on post-war Black social movements but has expanded to include how white psychological, medical, and educational epistemologies invented and shaped narratives about the Black experience as an exercise in biopower. His latest book, The Unteachables: Disabilty Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (2023) examines the discriminatory labeling of black students and their overrepresentation in classes for the intellectually disabled, emotional and behavior disordered, and learning disabled. Mayes is currently working on a follow-up, entitled, Clinical Badness: How the Behavioral Sciences Invented ‘Bad’ Black Behavior, looking at the history of anti-blackness in clinical medicine and how conceptions of school and societal disorders evolved into conduct disorders that helped construct the early versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals.
