Mary Poole

Mary is an historian on the faculty of Prescott College since 2003 who teaches and publishes in the arenas of U.S. and African history, with emphasis on histories of social movements, racial capitalism, colonialism, feminist and other critical social theory, and Indigenous decolonizing research methods. She came to history through a prior career in welfare policy as a fiscal analyst for the Washington State Senate, at a time of the federal dismantling of the U.S welfare state, and of rapid prison expansion and the corresponding increase in racially discriminatory new drug laws. She later served as Executive Director for Early Options for Unintended Pregnancy, a non-governmental organization established to teach family practice doctors techniques of early abortion. She earned my PhD at Rutgers, where she studied the intersections of race and gender in federal welfare policy. Her first book The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (UNC: 2006) demonstrates how the U.S. welfare state operates as a mechanism of racial capitalism, producing economic security as a property of whiteness.

Since the early 2000s, Mary has worked closely with East African Indigenous Maasai community leader, Meitamei Olol Dapash, on land rights, environmental justice and decolonizing research. Together we co-direct the Institute for Maasai Education, Research & Conservation (MERC) and have built together the Dopoi Center for community organizing, education and research, based in Maasailand, Southern Kenya. Our book,: Decolonizing Maasai History: A Path to Indigenous African Futures, will be published in January, 2025.
Mary has lived in Egypt, Scotland, and many places in the U.S., and currently splits her time between Prescott, Arizona and East Africa.