Douglas Flowe's research is primarily concerned with themes of criminality, vice, leisure, and masculinity, and understanding how they converge with issues of race, class, and space in American cities.
His current book project, entitled “Tell the Whole White World": Crime, Violence, and Black Men in New York City, 1890-1930 (under contract, University of North Carolina press in the “Justice, Power, and Politics” series) analyzes black crime within the prism of masculine identity, migration, the varied uses of urban public space, and racialized supervision.
With this in mind, the book registers illegality as a response to the authoritative gaze of white progressives, civic leaders, and police, and to the restrictions of joblessness, violence, and discrimination. Secondly it seeks to understand how changes in notions of black manhood connect to criminal, or criminalized, behaviors, incarceration, and the politics of intimate relationships, while also delineating a streaming contest between white and black men on the conceptual terrain of manliness.
Flowe is a graduate of the History program at the University of Rochester where he also served as the Graduate Recruitment and Retention Specialist for the David T. Kearns Center for Leadership and Diversity. In this role, Flowe also acted as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar Advisor, a National GEM Consortium Representative, and the chair of the Executive Committee for the New York Graduate Admissions Professionals (NYGAP).
Before joining WashU’s History Department, he was the Postdoctoral Fellow of Inequality and Identity in the American Culture Studies program from 2014-2016. Flowe is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the Urban History Association (UHA), and an Editorial Board Member for the Annuals of the Next Generation journal. He has also recently been awarded a Faculty Fellowship by Washington University’s Center for the Humanities for the Fall of 2018.