Frank W. Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and African American Studies
she/her
About
Areas of Interest
· Carceral state
· Prisons
· Policing
· Social Movement Activism
· Detroit
Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Blood in the Water was also a finalist for the National Book Award and it won the Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, and received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Upon its release Blood in the Waterwas prominently reviewed and profiled in the New York Times in four different sections, and Thompson herself was profiled in the highly-coveted “Talk” section in the New York Times Magazine. Blood in the Water ultimately landed on fourteen “Best of 2016” lists including the New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016 list, and ones published by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and others. The book also received rave reviews in over 100 top popular publications, and Thompson appeared on over 25 television shows, including PBS Newshour, CBS Sunday Morning and the Daily Show, as well as on over 50 radio programs, including Sirius and NPR.
She also wrote the book Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City in 2001 which was republished in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. Her commentary on that subject landed her on numerous local broadcasts, on a national news program, on CSPAN, and on two CNN documentaries.
Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, TIME, The Washington Post, Jacobin, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for the top publications in her field. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (December 2010) and “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011). Thompson’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly on how mass incarceration has distorted democracy in America was named a finalist for a best magazine article award.
On the policy front Thompson served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. The two-year, $1.5 million project was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thompson was also appointed to the National Academy of Sciences standing Committee on Law and Justice, and has served as well on the boards of several policy organizations including the Prison Policy Initiative, and on the advisory boards of Life of the Law as well as the Alliance of Families for Justice. She has also worked in an advisory capacity with the Square One Justice Project, the Art for Justice Fund, Humanities Action Lab Global Dialogues on Incarceration, the Open Society Foundation, and other policy organizations as well as foundations.
Thompson co-founded History Studio, a female-founded and fully diverse media consulting firm that works with the entertainment industry and publishing to produce authentic and culturally informed projects for film and television, gaming, theater, and in trade books. Thompson has consulted on numerous film projects including the Oscar-nominated film ATTICA, and is currently consulting on a major PBS series on Crime and Punishment in America as well as a podcast series on policing in America.
Thompson founded and currently co-runs the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, was named the Pitt Professor of History and Diplomacy at Cambridge University, and recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is now working on two books—one about Bernie Goetz’s notorious vigilante shootings on a NYC subway in 1984 and the other a long history of the 1985 police bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia.
