Nora Krinitsky

Nora Krinitsky is a historian of the modern United States, who specializes in urban history, African American history, the history of racial formation, and the history of the American carceral state. She earned her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Michigan in 2017. She was the postdoctoral fellow in African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University from 2017 to 2018 and is now a Michigan-Mellon postdoctoral fellow in egalitarianism and the metropolis at the University of Michigan. She has presented her work at meetings of the Urban History Association, the Policy History Conference, the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, and the American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Her work has been generously funded by the National Fellowship at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, the Illinois State Historical Society, the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and the University of Michigan Law School.

Current Work:

Nora Krinitsky's research examines the role of law enforcement and crime control policy in the governance of modern American cities with close attention to the relationship between local policing and racialization. Her book manuscript, "The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and Reform in Twentieth-Century Chicago," explores those issues through a case study of early-twentieth-century Chicago law enforcement, finding that crime control policy represented the central mode through which city leaders and reformers sought to order the rapidly growing and diversifying city. As a 2018-19 Michigan-Mellon postdoctoral fellow, she will use mapping tools and an online exhibition platform to create a digital humanities project documenting the history of police violence in Detroit and other major American cities since the early twentieth century.

Research Area Keyword(s):

History, urban, policing, carceral state