Professor Elizabeth Hinton is considered to be one of the leading experts on criminalization and policing in the United States. Professor Hinton earned her bachelor’s degree from New York University in 2005, and then completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013. Professor Hinton serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Prior to becoming a professor at Yale University, Professor Hinton spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and later served as an Associate Professor in the History department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. While at Harvard, Professor Hinton engaged students in thought provoking seminars including “Federal Policy, Urban Policing, and the Roots of Mass Incarceration.” This course focused on illuminating untold stories of urban patrol and surveillance programs of the 1970s and other law enforcement programs that trailed closely behind the signing of the Civil Rights Act.

Between earning degrees and teaching lectures, Professor Hinton has written several books; her research focuses on the persistence and prevalence of poverty, urban violence, and racial inequality in the twentieth century United States. In her 2016 book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, Professor Hinton dives into the history of mass incarceration in the United States by tracing the root of mass incarceration to the social welfare programs funded through Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the midst of the Civil Rights era. The book was awarded the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Professor Hinton’s new book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, is scheduled to be available to the public in May of this year. This book evaluates the racial inequalities of the past and present, specifically through evaluating police violence and the “black rebellion” starting from the 1960s through today.

Written by Nya Marsall, Class of 2021

Dr. Brandon Terry is a Baltimore-born Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard University. He earned an AB from Harvard College in Government and African and African American Studies, where he graduated magna cum laude. He later earned his Ph.D. with university distinction, also in Political Science and African American Studies, from Yale. He also earned an MSc in Political Theory Research with a Michael von Clemm fellowship at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, and has received other awards and fellowships from the Edmund J. Safra Center, Harvard’s Center for History and Economics, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, as well as Best American Essays in 2016.

Dr. Terry is currently writing “The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement,” a book manuscript and research project that aims to reconstruct the origins of debates over the civil rights movement. The manuscript utilizes African-American studies, political and literary theory, and historical philosophy to portray the importance in African-American culture of various mediums of recounting stories. He also co-edited To Make a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fifty Years Since MLK, both published in 2018, and is currently working on a study of black nationalist thought in the United States titled “Sovereignty, Soulcraft, and Suffering.”

Outside of his teaching and writings, Terry’s interests span the fields of African-American political and intellectual thought, modern political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, aesthetics, US history, American politics, the philosophy of race and racism, poverty, crime, and incarceration in political and social studies, and the sociology of hip-hop and black youth culture. In more traditional media spheres, Dr. Terry can be read as a contributor for the New York Times, NPR, WGBH, The Huffington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Point, The Nation, Time, Associated Press, Jacobin, MTV News, and more.

Written by Eli Scher, Class of 2021