Professional Bio

Dr. Debra Thompson is the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. A member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, she is internationally recognized as a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race. Her teaching and research interests focus on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in democratic societies. Dr. Thompson has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern University, and Ohio University, and held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University in 2010-2011.

​

Dr. Thompson’s book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book maps the changing nature of the census from an instrument historically used to manage and control racialized populations to its contemporary purpose as an important source of statistical information, employed for egalitarian ends, arguing that states seek to make their populations racially legible, turning the fluid and politically contested substance of race into stable, identifiable categories to be used as the basis of law and policy. The Schematic State has received three major awards from the American Political Science Association: the Race and Ethnic Politics section best book award in race and comparative politics, the Seymour M. Lipset award for the best book in Canadian politics, and an honourable mention from the International Politics and History section.

​

Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Scribner Canada, 2022) is equal parts a personal meditation, penetrating analysis, and pointed social critique of the dynamics of race and belonging over time and across the Canadian-U.S. border. The Long Road Home was one of Indigo’s top 100 books, CBC’s best non-fiction of 2022, the Hill Times top 100 books of 2022, the winner of the Canadian Political Science Association’s Donald Smiley Prize for the best book on Canadian politics and government and a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

​

Dr. Thompson is a frequent commentator in print media, radio, podcasts, and television. She appeared in the 2022 documentary Black Ice, is a contributing opinion columnist at the Globe and Mail, and, in collaboration with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, produces and hosts the In/Equality, a special series of the Policy Options podcast on the many facets of inequality in Canadian society. She is currently working on several projects that extract and examine the mechanics of systemic racism in Canada.

​

Areas of interest: 

Race and ethnic politics; Black politics; comparative race studies; diaspora and transnationalism; racial inequality; American/comparative political development.