Christina Heatherton (she/her) is the inaugural Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights. She is the founding Co-Director of the Trinity Social Justice Institute, the Director of Graduate Studies in American Studies, and the co-host and co-producer of the public humanities web series/podcast, Conjuncture.

Heatherton researches movements for social change. She is the author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, 2022), named one of the best books of 2022 by The Progressive Magazine (Madison, WI) and one of the best scholarly books of 2023 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. The book, now in paperback, will be translated into Spanish and republished by La Cigarra Press (Mexico City, Mexico) in Fall 2024. She is currently at work on a new project entitled Shadows without Bodies, an adaptation of her recent 2024 lecture at the London School of Economics. 

She has collaborated with social movements on several volumes. With Jordan T. Camp, she edited Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016), selected for New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s “Reading List for America” (2016) and “Black Liberation Reading List” (2020). She previously edited Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (Freedom Now Books, 2011) and co-edited with Camp Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012). She is working on a project about the theories and methods for collaborative research and movement archives entitled "Grounded Ways of Knowing."  

Her work appears in scholarly volumes such as Violence, Crime and Media, edited by Waqas Tufail et. al, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023);  The Cambridge History of America in the World, (eds.) Kristin Lee Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022); Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change, (ed.) Leela Fernandes (NYU Press, 2018); Futures of Black Radicalism, (eds.) Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso, 2017); and The Rising Tides of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, (ed.) Moon-Ho Jung (Univ. of Washington Press, 2014); in journals such as American Quarterly, Society and Space, Women's Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, City, Social Justice, Interface; and in popular venues.

She previously founded and co-directed several public facing initiatives, including: New Directions in American Studies at Barnard College; the Oral History and Activism Project; and the Working Group on Racial Capitalism, a project of the Center for Study of Social Difference (CSSD), Columbia University. As Acting Director of the Trinity Social Justice Institute, she facilitates manuscript workshops, public lectures, research clusters, and collaborative research grounded in social justice. With Jordan T. Camp, she is currently compiling interviews and essays for an edited collection entitled Conjuncture.