Contemporary Issues Forum

Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

SPEAKER:

Heather Ann Thompson, Ph.D.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Author and Historian at the University of Michigan

TOPIC:

Fear and Fury is a historical work by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson. It investigates the 1984 subway shooting in New York City and analyzes its profound implications for American race relations, politics, and democracy.

Book Signing (following lecture): Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

Speaker Bio:

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 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.

Venue located on Chautauqua Institution grounds; a gate pass is required.