Heather Ann Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lawrence, Kansas, U.S. |
| Education | University of Michigan (BA) University of Michigan (MA) Princeton University (PhD) |
| Occupation(s) | Historian, author |
| Website | www |
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, and professor fromDetroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016Bancroft Prize, and five other awards for her workBlood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. This book was also a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History as well as the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award. She is the recipient of several social justice awards as well, including the Life-Long Dedication to Social Justice Award, and the Alliance of Families for Justice and the Regents Distinguished Award for Public Service. She was awarded the Pitt Professorship of American History and Diplomacy in 2019-2020 (University of Cambridge, UK) and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. Thompson was also named a distinguished lecturer by theOrganization of American Historians.[1]
Thompson was born inLawrence, Kansas. Her early childhood was spent inBloomington, Indiana, andOxford, England, but in her teen years the family moved to the NorthRosedale Park neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. Thompson graduated fromCass Technical High School. Thompson's parents are Ann Curry Thompson, alabor lawyer in Detroit, and Frank Wilson Thompson Jr., (1942-2021) a professor of economics at theUniversity of Michigan, who also taught each summer atHarvard University, as well as at other universities internationally. Thompson is married to historian Jonathan Daniel Wells. She has three children.
Thompson earned bachelor's and master's degrees from theUniversity of Michigan and completed her PhD atPrinceton University. Thompson was a faculty member at theUniversity of North Carolina, Charlotte, from 1997 to 2009, and then was a faculty member ofTemple University inPhiladelphia from 2009 to 2015. In 2015, Thompson returned to the Detroit-area when she and her husband accepted faculty positions at the University of Michigan. Thompson writes about the history and current crises ofmass incarceration for numerous publications. Her work has been featured inThe New York Times,Newsweek,The Washington Post,Jacobin,NBC,Time,The Atlantic,Salon,Huffington Post, andDissent. She has also appeared onNPR,Sirius Radio, and various television news programs in the U.S. and abroad. Several of Thompson's scholarly pieces, including "Why Mass Incarceration Matters", have won best article awards, and her popular piece inThe Atlantic, "How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America",[2] was named a finalist for the Best Media Award given by theNational Council on Crime and Delinquency.[3] Thompson was aSoros justice fellow.[4]
In 2015, Thompson co-founded the Carceral State Project and Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative at the University or Michigan. She has been on the board of numerous organizations, and was a member of the standing Committee in Law and Justice at the National Academies.[citation needed] She served on aNational Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel to study causes and consequences ofincarceration in the U.S.[1] Thompson's books include:Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, August 2016);Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001, new edition 2017); and the edited collection,Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s. She is now completing two new books: the first is a comprehensive history of the Bernhard Goetz Subway Vigilante shootings of 1984 and the second is a long history of the 1985 Philadelphia police of MOVE.
The culmination of more than a decade of research,Blood in the Water offers the first definitive account of the 1971Attica Prison riot. The book was released in August 2016 to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the country's largest prison rebellion. The book sheds new light on the riot, the state's violent response, and the decades-long implications of Attica for those involved as well asAmerica's criminal justice system. Thompson's research for the book included interviews with former Attica prisoners, hostages, families of victims, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, and state officials, as well as significant amount of material never before released to the public.Blood in the Water was winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2017.[5] Thompson also served as the lead historical consultant for the documentaryAttica, released byShowtime in 2021.[6]
Thompson's 2001 book,Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City is a regularly cited account of thehistory of Detroit during the tumultuous1960s and 1970s. It is a comprehensive account of police brutality against marginalized groups, and the black political reaction to it in this period, as well as the underlying reasons for why Detroit became such a crucial site of black political activism and black political power after 1973. The book was published byCornell University Press and a new edition was published in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of theDetroit riot of 1967. This updated edition addresses issues currently facing Detroit as well as the city's recentbankruptcy and the current challenges the city faces thanks to recordrates of incarceration.
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