Heather Ann Thompson

Heather Ann Thompson is professor of history at in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, the Residential College, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History for her work "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy." She writes about the history as well as current crises of mass incarceration for numerous popular and scholarly publications. Several of Thompson’s scholarly pieces, including “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” have won best article awards. Her popular piece in The Atlantic, “How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America,” was named a finalist for the Best Media Award given by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Thompson is a Soros Justice Fellow, sits on the board of the Prison Policy Initiative, and recently served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel to study causes and consequences of incarceration in the United States. In that capacity she has presented to various policy organizations in Washington, DC, has given briefings on incarceration to Congressional staff, and participated in a historic bipartisan summit on criminal justice reform in March 2015. Her books include "Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City" and the edited collection "Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s." Thompson was also named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.