Debra
Thompson
Debra Thompson is a scholar who specializes in the politics of race. She is the author of The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census, which received three major awards from the American Political Science Association. She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals including Canadian Journal of Political Science and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. She is also a regular commentator in print and on television in Canada and the United States. Thompson is an associate professor of political science at McGill University and lives in Montreal.
Award History
2022 Finalist
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfictionfor The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging
Jury Citation
“Through direct and evocative prose, Debra Thompson skillfully leads the reader into a rare perspective on the world of Canadian and American Black life. Navigating the space between her father’s ancestors who fled enslavement and her own life as one of very few Black women working in the field of political science, Thompson breaks ground in both countries. Engagingly personal and crisply political, The Long Road Home illuminates how the experience of Blackness cannot be explained by drawing a line at the 49th parallel.”
