Professor of History, Urban and Regional Planning, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor
About
Matt Lassiter is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book project, The Suburban Crisis: Crime, Drugs, and White Middle-Class America, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. He is on the steering committee of the U-M Carceral State Project and the co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative. He is also director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab and coordinator of the Environmental Justice HistoryLab, each of which involves undergraduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects. He has served on the boards of the Urban History Association, Urban History, and the Journal of Policy History and is a series editor of “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Selected Publications:
Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (2020), collaborative digital exhibit.
Civil Rights in America: Racial Discrimination in Housing (National Historical Landmarks Program, 2020)
“Ten Propositions for the New Political History,” Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
“Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History (June 2015)
“Suburban Diversity in Postwar America,” Journal of Urban History (January 2013), coauthored with Christopher Niedt
“Political History Beyond the Red-Blue Divide,” Journal of American History (December 2011)
The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009), coedited with Joseph Crespino.
The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006)
Affiliation(s)
Field(s) of Study
- political history
- urban/suburban studies
- racial and social inequality
- policing and the carceral state
