Elizabeth Hinton, one of the nation's leading experts on policing and mass incarceration in the United States, was recently appointed the Class of 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies, effective immediately.
She is a member of Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and has a secondary appointment as professor of law at Yale Law School.
Hinton joined the Yale faculty in 2020, having previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan.
Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. Her first book, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America" (2016) received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and landed on the "notable book" lists of The New York Times, Time magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine. Her second, "America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion in the 1960s" (2021), was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Hinton's scholarly work has also been published in Science, Nature, The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, and The Journal of Urban History, and she is regularly invited to deliver endowed lectures and keynote presentations beyond Yale. She is also a sought-after commentator and public intellectual, with articles and op-eds regularly published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time.
This year, she was invited to give Duke University's Robert R. Wilson Distinguished Lecture. The lecture, titled "Racism, Law, and the Hidden Power of the Archive," built on her research on the challenges posed by the U.S. Supreme Court's standards and the difficulty of proving that a law is racially discriminatory. In 2024, Hinton received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. In addition, her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. She was also elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Hinton has created and taught numerous new courses in her time at Yale, including "African American History from Emancipation to the Present," "The Wars on Crime, Drugs, and Gangs," "Justice and Society," and the Senior Colloquium for students in the African American Studies concentration.
At Yale, she has also served as part of faculty search committees in History and African American Studies, as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of African American Studies, as well as a member of the Humanities Tenure and Appointments Committee.
Hinton, who was the founding co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at Harvard, now leads the Yale Institute on Incarceration and Public Safety (YIIPS), a university-based center for research, policy innovation, and community engagement focused on transforming how safety and justice are understood and pursued in the United States. Its Justice for Everybody program, in partnership with the in Carceral Studies Journalism Guild, recently hosted a journalism symposium for incarcerated individuals at the Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, California.
"This event created a transformative, inspirational space in Valley State Prison," she said. "Our programming empowered residents as creators, affirmed their role as historians, recognized them as colleagues, and honored them as subject matter experts. It modeled the way storytelling can be a form of community empowerment in service of public safety."
In her field more broadly, Hinton served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System and will become the President of the Urban History Association in 2026.
Hinton received her B.A. at New York University, and earned an M.A., M.Phil., and her Ph.D. at Columbia University.
