Elizabeth Hinton

Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor of History and 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. In her 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 from the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies and initiated the expansion of the U.S. prison system. In revealing the links between the rise of the American carceral state and earlier anti-poverty programs, Hinton presents Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs not as a sharp policy departure but rather as the realization of a shift towards surveillance and confinement that began during the Johnson administration. Before coming to Yale, Hinton was a Professor in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She was previously 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 received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2013. Hinton has authored articles and op-eds in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time. She coedited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction with the late Manning Marable.