Bryan Wagner is associate professor in the English Department and affiliated faculty in the American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. He received a BA from Carleton College and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia before coming to Berkeley in 2002. His primary research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has secondary interests in legal history, cultural theory, and popular music. His first book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, a study of black vernacular expression and its entanglement with the law, was published by Harvard University Press in 2009. He is currently working on two books: Fables of Moral Economy, a close analysis of black oral traditions engaged with problems of property and subsistence, and Fugitives, Contrabands, Spies, Servants & Laborers, an experiment in historiography that considers the new social history of slavery  from the standpoint of its source materials. He has published articles and review essays in journals including American Literature, Representations, American Quarterly, and African American Review. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California President's Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies. In the English Department, his regular courses include both sections of the undergraduate survey in African American literature, a lecture on the literature and culture of Reconstruction, and an American Cultures course on “Race and Ethnicity in Hollywood Cinema.”