Book Talk | Heather Ann Thompson | Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Race and Public Space Working Group on Monday, March 30, at 5:30 PM for an event with historian Heather Ann Thompson. She will discuss her new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage, with Nicole R. Fleetwood and L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy

Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Thompson has written about the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. She has served on the National Academy of Sciences blue ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States, co-runs the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, and has been the recipient of numerous honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a Racial Justice Fellowship from the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. Thompson has also served as a historical consultant for film and television, including on the Oscar-nominated feature documentary Attica.

Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration, which debuted at MoMA PS1 (September 17, 2020-April 5, 2021). The exhibition was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by The New York Times and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Fleetwood is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, which focuses on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration. She is a series associate editor of the ten-volume series, Gender: Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. With Sarah Tobias, she co-edited “The New Status Quo: Essays on Poverty in the United States and Beyond,” a special issue of Feminist Formations (Spring 2021). Her writing appears in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Artforum, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Granta, Hyperallergic, LitHub, The New York Times, Public Books, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, art catalogues, and edited anthologies. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and public programs at MoMA PS1, Zimmerli Art Museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Brown University, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture, Cleveland Public Library, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and Worth Rises. She is the inaugural Genevieve Young Writing Fellow of the Gordon Parks Foundation.

L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy is an associate professor in the Sociology of Education program in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science and Humanities at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. He holds a PhD in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (2008) and a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA (2000). His central line of research concentrates on educational inequality particularly focused on the intersecting roles of race, class, and place. His first book, Inequality in the Promised Land: Race, Resources, and Suburban Schooling, examined the experiences of low-income and racial minority families’ attempts at accessing school-related resources in an affluent suburb. He is currently fielding a multi-site ethnographic study in Westchester County that examines residents’ experiences with housing and schools. His larger research interests include race and racism, gender justice, and community mobilization. His research has appeared in multiple edited volumes and academic journals such as Urban Education, American Educational Research Journal, and Ethnic & Racial Studies. He is a frequent media contributor and public speaker. His insights have been included in Ebony Magazine, The Grio, The Root, US World News Report and on channels such as CNN and Al Jazeera.