Dr. Heather Ann Thompson
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 received five additional book awards including the Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council for Crime and Delinquency. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Award and The Cundill Book Prize. Blood in the Water received an honorable mention for the Silver Gavel Award (2017) as well.
Upon its release, Blood in the Water was 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. This book 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 55 radio programs.
Heather Ann Thompson was the historical consultant for the Academy Award-nominated documentary ATTICA, directed by Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry.
In 2022 Blood in the Water remains a top book on many lists including New York Magazine’s 14 Best books on the American Prison System, Book Riot’s 8 of the Best Books about the Broken US Criminal Justice System, and the notable, 20 Books that have Changed the way that we Think about Race in America, Business Insider’s 23 Best Books Written by Women, and a list that particularly moved her, Books that Inspired the Innocence Project.
Heather Ann Thompson’s audience goes well beyond her work in Blood in the Water. She also wrote a seminal study of black politics in urban America in the 1960s and 1970s Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City in 2001 which was re-published in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. Thompson’s commentary on the subject of this, and other, urban uprisings (particularly in the wake of the killing of George Floyd), has landed her on numerous local broadcasts, on CSPAN, on several CNN documentaries, on the award winning film, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, and on myriad radio and television new interviews, as well as interviewed by reporters for the New York Times, Time, the Washington Post, and other major outlets.
As a public intellectual Thompson writes regularly on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the Covid crisis for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for top scholarly publications. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (Best Article Prize, Urban History Association, 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, (Best Article Prize, American Sociological Association Labor Network). Her 2014 article “How Prisons Change the Balance of Power,” The Atlantic (2013) was a finalist for the 2014 Media for a Just Society Best Article prize.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Attica Uprising Thompson penned this article in TIME and this in The Nation on the the legacy of this historic uprising.
Thompson has also served as the historical consultant on documentaries such as the BET/CBS News collaboration Boiling Point and the highly anticipated 4 part documentary series on crime and punishment for PBS by filmmaker Lynn Novick, and she has consulted as well on documentaries about the Bard Prison Initiative, by the CNN Mini-series on 1968, on an Anthony Bourdain produced Detroit documentary, on PBS documentaries produced by Henry Louis Gates, on the Emmy award-winning Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica (Blue Sky Films, 2013), on Maia Weschsler’s Melvin and Jean: An American Story. (2013), and on the National Geographic documentary, The Final Report: Attica Prison Riot. (2006).
Thompson and historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar are co-founders, along with Becky Nicolaides, of History Studio, a boutique consulting firm that bridges the worlds of academy and the entertainment industry in exciting new ways.
On the policy front Thompson served on the historic National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. She currently serves on the standing Committee on Law and Justice also of the National Academy of Sciences. Thompson has served on myriad other policy and advisory boards, including the widely acclaimed States of Incarceration Project, the Art for Justice Fund, and is a co-founder of the new Carceral State Project, with its Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative, at the University of Michigan. In 2018 she and colleagues were awarded a multi-year grant to begin work this research project—the first of its kind comprehensively to document the experiences of being policed and incarcerated from the perspective of those who have experienced it most directly. In May of 2022 Thompson and Co-PIs Matthew Lassiter and Christian Davenport were awarded substantial multi-year research grant to expand their pathbreaking work on confinement, criminalization, and control in America’s vast carceral state.
For recognition of her work as a scholar, Thompson was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write her next book on the MOVE Bombing of 1985, and in 2019-2020 Thompson she was awarded, and served as, the Pitt Professor of American History and Diplomacy at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2018 and 2020, Thompson was also awarded a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund and, although she was unable to accept it at that time, Thompson was also invited to be the Writer in Residence in the Shorenstein Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University for the academic year 2018-2019. In 2017 Thompson was awarded a year-long fellowship from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University where she spend the academic year 2017-2018. Earlier in her career Thompson has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society, and other smaller funders.
Thompson recently finished her term as President of the Urban History Association (2018-2022). She was President of the Southern Labor Studies Association from 2008-2009, and was named a Distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians in 2013. 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.