Jermaine Thibodeaux is a native of Third Ward, Houston, Texas. For more than fifteen years, he taught middle and high school history in independent schools in Houston and the Boston area. He is currently Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Trained in the department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, his academic interests include African American history, Black Texas, carceral studies and Black masculinities. His most recent book chapters appear in Capturing Labor: History of Unfree Labor in the Southwest (Universuty of Texas Press, 2026) and the Colored Conventions Meovement (UNC Press, 2021), which explores the role of race and heteropatriarchy during the earlt Colored Conventions movement in Texas. He is presently at work on articles exploring the civic and legal precarity of Black Texasns at the height of the convict leasing and prison farms eras in the state, and an article that explores West African migration to Texas and their employment within the Texas Department of Corrections. He is also penning a chapter on Jim Crow policing for the Cambridge Companion to American Carcaral History. Additionally, he is revising his dissertation manuscript that explores the long and sordid connections between the Texas sugar industry and the rise of the state’s penitentiary system. That project, titled, “The House that Cane Built: Sugar, Race, and the Gendered Formations of the Texas Prison Farm System, 1883-1926,” centers the commodity of sugar in a retelling of the prison farm system’s history and in so doing, foregrounds Black male convicts and their labor as crucial to the establishment and growth of the Texas carceral landscape. Dr. Thibodeaux is also an active member of the Southern Historical Association, Southern Labor Studies Association, and the Organization of American Historians. At OU, he is a core board member of the Carceral Studies Consortium.
Outside of academia, he follows closely national politics and issues relating to labor rights and criminal justice reform. He is also a self-proclaimed hip-hop enthusiast (Young Money for like!), a lowkey opera buff, social media fiend, reality tv junkie, and a displaced Cajun foodie and BBQ expert.
Education:
A.B. (History), Cornell University
M.A. (History), University of Texas—Austin
Ph.D (History), University of Texas—Austin
