Director

Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. Hinton’s first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), 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. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and America on Fire were both named New York Times Notable Books. Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of Science, Nature, The American Historical Review, 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. With the late historian Manning Marable, she co-edited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). Hinton served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

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. Her research has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation.