NCID-1083
Heather Thompson
Cedric J Robinson Collegiate Professor of History and African American Studies, Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Professor in the Residential College and Professor of History, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 American History (Princeton University)
About
Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a 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 was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in history. Thompson has written extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Pro, in the 1960s and 1970s. Thompson has just been awarded a fellowship from the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and she served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that conducted a 24-month study on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. Thompson has also spent considerable time presenting her work on prisons and justice policy to universities and policy groups nationally and internationally as well as to state legislators in various states.
Current Work
Via a history of surveillance in the United States Dr. Thompson's book, Deep Cover: Surveillance and the State Building Origins of American Carcerality, will examine the extent to which—in the wake of WW II and in the face of Cold War pressures abroad as well as Civil Rights pressures at home—the construction of a stable American state depended upon monitoring, neutralizing, containing, and even eliminating, threats to its legitimacy. It hypothesizes that the legitimacy and stability of the American nation state was structurally dependent upon a robust carceral state. As important, it posits that the reverse was equally true—that the seemingly limitless expansion American of the carceral state after WW II depended upon the stability and foundational legitimacy of the American state.
Research Area Keyword(s)
crime, justice, labor, policing, Prisons, Social movements, Urban