Christina Heatherton
Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of anti-racist social movements. She is currently completing her first book, Making Internationalism: The Color Line, the Class Struggle, and the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, forthcoming). With Jordan T. Camp, she edited Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso Books, 2016) as well as Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012). Her work appears or will appear in the Cambridge History of America in the World, edited by Kristin Lee Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change, edited by Leela Fernandes (New York University Press, 2018); Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso Books, 2017); and The Rising Tides of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, edited by Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington Press, 2014), as well as in journals such as American Quarterly, Interface, Social Justice, and City. Her writing also appears in popular venues such as Public Seminar, Funambulist Magazine, Politics/Letters, The Washington Spectator, and 032 Magazine. She is the editor of Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (Freedom Now Books, 2011). She is the current co-director of several initiatives including: New Directions in American Studies (NDAS); the Oral History and Activism Project; the Working Group on Racial Capitalism, a project of the Center for Study of Social Difference (CSSD), Columbia University.
- What is American Studies?
- Theorizing Activism
- Global Radicalism
- American Studies: Senior Seminar
Center for the Study of Social Difference Grant, Columbia University, 2018-2021
Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant, Office of the President, Columbia University, 2019-20
Presidential Research Award, Office of the President, Barnard College, 2018-19
Inclusive Pedagogy Fund Award, Barnard College Office of the Provost, 2017-2020
- American Studies Association
- Association of American Geographers
- National Women’s Studies Association
- Organization of American Historians
“The World that COVID Made: Truck Routes, Commodity Chains, and Internationalism Today,” The Fate of Internationalism, London School of Economics and Fung Global Fellows Program, Princeton University, May 7, 2020.
“How to Make a Rope: The Color Line, Class Struggle and the Political Economy of Early Twentieth Century Rebellion,” American Studies Workshop Series, Program in American Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, March 9, 2020.
“How to Make a Dress: Domestic Labor, Internationalism, and the Radical Pedagogy of Elizabeth Catlett,” Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration Lecture Series, Yale University, New Haven, CT, March 3, 2020.
“The Political Economy of the Lynch Rope,” Interpreting American History Series, Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, November 4, 2019.
“What is Learned and What Remains Unspoken: Notes on the Precarious Academy” Presidential Session, American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Honolulu, HI, November 9, 2019.
“The World Has Become a Whispering Gallery: The Global Year of 1848,” Native Liberation Conference, plenary, Gallup, New Mexico, September 7, 2019.
“Debt Driven Surveillance and the Abolitionist International,” Mobilizations and Migrations Conference, Center for Place Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, April 13, 2019.
“The Color Line and the Class Struggle,” Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, February 13, 2019.
“Political Economy of the Color Line,” How We Get Free, Department of African American Studies, Princeton University, February 21, 2018.
“Surveillance/ Abolition/ Internationalism,” Scholar & Feminist Conference: Subverting Surveillance, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College, February 17, 2018.
“Catalogued by the Carceral State,” Homes for All, Cages for None, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College, October 10, 2017.
“Not Just Being Right, But Getting Free: Reflections on Class, Race, and Marxism,” Book launch, Verso, New York, NY, June 30, 2017.
“Abolition and the Current Crisis,” Slavery, Race, Revolutionary Abolitionism: Yesterday and Today, Collège d'études mondiales, Paris, France, May 16, 2017.
“When Culture Respects No Borders: Elizabeth Catlett, Global Harlem, and the Mexican Revolution,“ Contested Citizenship Conference, American Studies, Africana Studies, & El Instituto, University of Connecticut, March 13, 2017.
“Walking Warrants in the Neoliberal City," Securitization, Racism, and Narratives of Risk, Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, February 24, 2017.
“From Scottsboro to Black Lives Matter: Reviving the Spirit of the International Labor Defense,” University of Connecticut, School of Law, February 16, 2017.
Publications
Making Internationalism: The Color Line, the Class Struggle, and the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, forthcoming).
“Making the First International: Nineteenth-Century Regimes of Surveillance, Accumulation, Resistance, and Abolition,” in Cambridge History of America in the World, eds. Kristin Lee Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
“Freighted Love: Bearing the Weight of Neoliberal Urban Landscapes” City: Analysis of Urban Trends,Culture, Theory, Policy, Action Vol. 24 (Spring 2020).
"Forum: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes" (editor and participant) Social Justice, Special Issue, Neoliberal Confinements: Social Suffering in the Shadows of the Carceral State, eds. Ben Fleury-Steiner and Alessandro De Giorgi (2018).
“The Broken Windows of Rosa Ramos: Neoliberal Policing Regimes of Imminent Violability,” in Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change, edited by Leela Fernandes (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
“The World We Want: An Interview with Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson," (with Jordan T. Camp) in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, (New York: Verso, 2017).
Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, co-edited with Jordan T. Camp (New York: Verso Books, 2016).
Review of Marxism and Social Movements, eds. Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements 8:1 (May 2016).
“Relief and Revolution: Southern California Struggles Against Unemployment, 1930-1933,” in Rising Tides of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, ed. Moon Ho-Jung (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
“University of Radicalism: Ricardo Flores Magón and Leavenworth Penitentiary,” American Quarterly, Special Issue: Las Américas Quarterly 66:3 (Fall 2014).*Finalist, 2015 American Studies Association Constance M. Rourke Prize.
Selected Public Scholarship
Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond, co-edited with Jordan T. Camp (Los Angeles: Freedom Now Books, 2012).*Reviewed in City 17.5 (Fall 2013): 699-702.
Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader, editor (Los Angeles: Freedom Now Books, 2011).*Reviewed in the National Political Science Review 17:2 (Spring 2016): 123-125.
“The Crisis of Policing in America” (co-authored with Jordan T. Camp), Verso Books Blog, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4749-the-crisis-of-policing-in-america, June 10, 2020.
“The Death Ship,” Sentencing the Present, Public Seminar, New School Publishing Initiative, May 2020.
“Racism, Imperialism, Solidarity: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” with Jordan T. Camp and Manu Karuka, Politics/Letters, May 2019.
“Forward,“ Wicked Hartford by Stephen Thornton (Charleston: The History Press, 2017).
“Not Just Being Right, But Getting Free: Reflections on Class, Race, and Marxism,” Verso Books Blog, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs, July 2017.
“Broken Windows Neoliberalism,” Funambulist, Paris, France, November-December 2016.
“Policing the Crisis, Policing the Planet: An Interview with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp,” interview by Ben Mabie, Viewpoint Magazine, October 12, 2016.
"A Global Policing Crisis: A Q&A with Editors of Policing the Planet," interview by Aaron Cantú, Washington Spectator, June 17, 2016.
"A Planetary Crisis of Policing," with Jordan T. Camp and Fatima Al Qadiri, 032c Magazine, Berlin, Germany, July 11, 2016.