Elizabeth Hinton

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

In her first book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, 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 the US prison system. Hinton’s new book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s was published in 2021.

Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a Professor in the Department 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 PhD in United States History from Columbia University in 2013.

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