Elizabeth Hinton

Elizabeth Hinton

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies
Hinton head shot

Elizabeth Hinton is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies. Hinton's research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th century United States. She is the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, which received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and was named one of the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2016. Considered one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of criminalization and mass incarceration, Hinton’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. In March 2018, Hinton co-organized the landmark conference “Beyond the Gates: The Past and Future of Prison Education at Harvard.” The mission of the conference and the continued commitment of Beyond the Gates is to expand educational access for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and to create a more inclusive community of learners at Harvard. Hinton's articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time

Current Role

Faculty Associate