Elizabeth K. Hinton

Elizabeth K. Hinton is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Considered one of the nation’s leading experts on criminalization and policing, Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States.

In her first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies and laid the groundwork for the expansion of U.S. policing and prison regimes. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime received numerous awards and recognition, including the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her recent book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (Liveright 2021), won a Robert F. Kennedy book award. America on Fire provides a new framework for understanding the problem of police abuse and the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color in post-civil rights America. Both From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and American on Fire were named New York Times Notable books.

Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. A Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation Fellow, Hinton completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013.

Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of Science, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time. She also coedited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) with the late historian Manning Marable.