Associate Director

Heather Ann Thompson, PhD History

Heather Ann Thompson earned her PhD from Princeton University in 1995 and came to Temple University as an Associate Professor of History in the departments of African American Studies and History. Thompson is currently working on a book about the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 to be published by Pantheon Books. She is the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press: 2001) and has recently published an edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (Prentice Hall, 2009) as well as two chapters in books: “Blinded by the Barbaric South: The Ironic History of Penal Reform in Modern America,” in Crespino and Lassiter, eds. The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford, 2009) and “All Across the Nation: Urban Black Activism, North and South, 1965-1975,” in Kusmer and Trotter, eds. African American Urban History and Race Relations after World War Two (University of Chicago, 2009). Thompson's article “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in Postwar American History,” was published in the Journal of American History (December 2010), and she has other articles also coming out in journals such as Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas that also address aspects of the carceral state and the evolution of postwar American history.