Research Interests: Post-1945  urban history and labor history. Justice Policy and the history of  crime and punishment in postwar America. Black Power history and the history of radical movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

Recent Awards:

• The Soros Justice Fellowship. The Open Society Institute. 2006-2007
• The Franklin Research Grant, The American Philosophical Association. 2005
•  The Hackman Research Residency Grant, The New York State Archives. 2004
•   Littleton-Griswold Research Grant, American Historical Association. 2004
•   The Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Archive Center Research Grant. 2004

Select Publications:

• Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press: February 2002)
• “Telling it Like it Really Was: Women’s Movement Activism and Movement Making in Postwar America.” Review essay of Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 and Christina Greene, Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina Warriors in Reviews in American History. (March, 2006)
• "Making a Second Urban History." Essay collection commemorating the publication of Arnold Hirsch's Making a Second Ghetto, in the Journal of Urban History (May 2003)
• "Another War at Home: Reexamining Working Class Politics in the 1960s," MidAmerica. (September 2000)
• "Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City: Detroit, 1945-1980," Journal of Urban History. (January 1999)

Current Projects:

Heather Thompson is currently working on a book about the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 to be published by Pantheon Books. She is also editing a new reader entitled, Speaking Out in the Sixties and Seventies: Documenting the American Struggle for Rights and Recognition for Prentice Hall. Other works in progress include: Book chapter. “Blinded by a “Barbaric” South: Prison Horrors, Inmate Abuse and the Ironic History of Penal Reform in the Postwar United States” in Lassiter and Crespino, ed.: The End of Southern History?. Book chapter. “Taking it to the Streets, Plants, and Prisons of Postwar America: Urban Black Activism and Struggle during the 1960s and 1970s” in Kenneth Kusmer and Joe Trotter, ed : new volume on African American urban history and race relations in the decades since World War II.Book chapter. "The Midwestern Freedom Struggle and the Remaking of the Urban America: Lessons from Postwar Detroit" in Rusty Monhollen, ed., The Black Freedom Struggle in the Midwest (Palgrave). Thompson is also completing three new articles that she plans to submit to: Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas, The Journal of American History, and the Journal of Urban History.

Courses Taught: