Professor Max Krochmal
Max Krochmal, Ph.D., is Professor of U.S. History and the Czech Republic Endowed Professor and Director of Justice Studies at the University of New Orleans. A committed scholar-activist, Krochmal is the award-winning author of Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press) and co-editor of Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press). He also directed the oral history project undergirding the volume, with support from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant. As a Fulbright-García Robles fellow, Krochmal served as the Chair of U.S. Studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City (2022). Previously, Krochmal was the founding Chair of the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and a history professor at Texas Christian University. A frequent collaborator with grassroots social movement organizations as well as government and nonprofit agencies, Krochmal co-chaired the Fort Worth Independent School District Racial Equity Committee (2017-2021) and partnered with the district and colleagues to co-create Latinx Studies Curriculum in K-12 Schools: A Practical Guide (TCU Press, Dec. 2022). He currently serves as president of the Southern Labor Studies Association and an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. He is a native of Reno, Nevada, and majored in Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before earning graduate degrees in History at Duke University.
“Dr. Max,” as he is known by his students, adds: “My research examines coalition-building among African American, Chicanx-Latinx, and white community organizers across the long civil rights era, from the 1930s to the present. I explore how a wide range of activists organized their separate bases and how and why they frequently built alliances across the color line. I weave together traditional written records from buried archives with new oral history interviews. With these sources, I write narrative histories that combine scholarly analysis with accessible prose for popular audiences. My work uses a relational framework to contribute to the separate fields of U.S. African American, Chicanx-Latinx, and labor and working-class histories, to 20th Century U.S. history as a whole, and to the regional histories of the U.S. South and West. I also engage with the interdisciplinary fields of Latinx, African American, and Comparative Ethnic Studies. My teaching draws on this research to create a democratic, inquiry-based learning environment. I offer community-engaged courses on oral history methods and Justice Studies and previously co-founded the TCU Justice Journey, a distinctive experiential-learning course on the African American and Chicanx liberation struggles.”
Krochmal also owns and operates Professor Max & Associates, LLC, your one-stop shop for independent scholarly expertise, consulting, speaking engagements, and community services. Please use the form below to contact him for more information.
professormax.org 