The Faculty-Graduate seminar is an intimate intellectual community that comes together to discuss work in progress around a common theme across a wide range of disciplines. Our goal is to establish a small but intellectually diverse and committed group of scholars who will attend all meetings and engage in sustained discourse during the year. Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes followed by dinner. Given these goals and the limited meeting space, we will be accepting only twelve (12) graduate students into each semester’s seminar. We encourage graduate students to commit to both semesters and preference for spring registration will be given to students engaged in the fall seminar. Participation in the African American Studies’ Faculty-Graduate Seminar for one academic year or the equivalent (two semesters) will fulfill one of the requirements for the AAS Graduate Certificate

The Black 1980s: Promises of Inclusion, Perils of Access

From the end of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to the mid 1990s, Black life in the United States and beyond underwent profound political, social and economic changes.  These transformations have been buried under the language of “post-civil rights era”, telling us little of how that aftermath was experienced in Black communities and among Black people. It remains a period seemingly impervious to historical treatment and understanding. The purpose of our speaker series is to bring light to the tumultuous time of twilight of the twentieth century. Black political thought and struggle did not end with “the sixties” but it changed dramatically, often fractured along the lines of class and gender. The ‘War on Drugs’, demonization of single Black mothers, rising Black poverty and an incipient war on social welfare uneasily co-existed with a historic rise in Black political representation and the emergence of a small but significant Black elite. It was also a quizzical time in terms of the explosion of Black cultural production. Even as Black poor and working-class people were deeply reviled by those in power, Black culture dominated American society.  We seek to understand these developments, their contradictions, and the wide variety of responses they provoked. 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Joshua Guild are the AY25 Fac-Grad Seminar Faculty Conveners.

Meet The Speaker

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a native Detroiter and historian on faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the departments of Afro-American and African Studies, History, and the Residential College.

Her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, has been profiled

 on television and radio programs across the country. It has just won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, The Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and a book prize from the New York City Bar Association. The book was also named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize in History, a finalist for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association (winner announced May, 2017), and it was named on 14 Best Books of 2016 lists including those compiled by The New York Times, Newsweek, Kirkus Review, the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Bloomberg, the Marshall Project, the Baltimore City Paper, Book Scroll, and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, Blood in the Water was named on the Best Human Rights Books of 2016 list, and received starred reviews from Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. Blood in the Water has also been optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by acclaimed screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Schrapnel.

Thompson has written extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for the top publications in her field. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (December 2010) and “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011). Thompson’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly on how mass incarceration has distorted democracy in America was named a finalist for a best magazine article award in 2014.

Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (new edition out May, 2017), and is the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

On the policy front, Thompson served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. The two-year, $1.5 million project was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thompson has served as well on the boards of several policy organizations including the Prison Policy Initiative, the Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic site, and on the advisory boards of Life of the Law.  She has also worked in an advisory capacity with the Center for Community Change, the Humanities Action Lab Global Dialogues on Incarceration, and the Open Society Foundation on issues related to work. Thompson has also spent considerable time presenting her work on prisons and justice policy to universities and policy groups nationally and internationally as well as to state legislators in various states.  She has given talks in countries such as France, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, the UK, as well as across the Unites States, including in Hawaii.

In 2016 Thompson became President-elect of the Urban History Association and, in 2012, the Organization of American Historians named her a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Along with Rhonda Y. Williams (Case Western Reserve), she also currently edits a manuscript series for UNC Press, Justice, Power, and Politics. Additionally, she is the sole editor of the series, American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century published by Routledge. Thompson has consulted on several documentary films including Criminal Injustice at Attica and assisted with other documentary films including one on Criminalization in America by filmmakers Annie Stopford and Llewellyn Smith from BlueSpark Collaborative, another produced by Henry Louis Gates entitled, Still I Rise: Black Power to the White House for PBS, and one soon to be done on the Bard Prison Initiative.