Dr. Rebecca Thorpe

Biography

Rebecca U. Thorpe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on U.S. political institutions and state development, emphasizing the growth and fortification of the American empire, mass suburbanization, urban gentrification, and the rise of the expansive U.S. prison complex. Her book, American Warfare State: Domestic Politics Military Spending, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014, examines the development and persistence of the U.S. military complex and the presidential power to launch military actions. Currently, Thorpe is working on a book project that explores how state interventions are shaped by the racial and spatial dimensions of poverty, violence, and incarceration in post-World War II American society. Her work has garnered national recognition, receiving the American Political Science Association's Richard Neustadt Award for best book on executive politics in 2015, the D. B. Hardeman Award from the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation for the book on Congress in 2016, and APSA’s Heinz Eulau Award for an article in Perspectives on Politics in 2016. Thorpe earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland in 2010 and was a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution in 2008-2009. She served as a Capitol Hill Fellow with the American Political Science Association during the 2009-2010 academic year.

Research Interests