Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson discusses civil liberties in our heavily surveilled and incarcerated society.

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Bio

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a native Detroiter and historian on faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, has been profiled on television and radio programs across the country, and it recently won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the Ridenhour Book Prize. The book was named on 14 Best Books of 2016 lists including those compiled by the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Baltimore City Paper. Blood in the Water has also been optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by acclaimed screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Schrapnel.

Thompson has written extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, and the Huffington Post, as well as for the top publications in her field. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (new edition just out), and is the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

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 US. Thompson has served as well on the boards of several policy organizations including the Prison Policy Initiative, the Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic site, and on the advisory boards of Life of the Law. In 2016, Thompson became president-elect of the Urban History Association and in 2012, the Organization of American Historians named her a distinguished lecturer. Along with Rhonda Y. Williams (Case Western Reserve), she currently edits a manuscript series for UNC Press, Justice, Power, and Politics. She is also the sole editor of the series American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century published by Routledge.

Read more about Thompson and her work on her website.