Event Detail

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of geography and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She serves on the board of the Economic Roundtable, she is a founding member of the anti-prison groups California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, and is past-president of the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Gilmore’s awards include an NEA Grant, a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, the James Blaut Award for Critical Geography, the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Economic and Environmental Justice, a Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students, and the Lora Romero Best Book Prize from the American Studies Association. She is the president-elect of the American Studies Association. In addition to Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007), recent publications include “Race, Prisons, and War: Scenes from the History of U.S. Violence” in Violence Today: Actually Existing Barbarism (2008), and “Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning” in Engaging Contradictions (2008). She received a bachelor and a master of fine arts in dramatic literature and criticism from Yale University, and a doctorate in geography from Rutgers University.

Cosponsored by the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Department of Development Sociology