Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Oregon. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Toronto (2010) and was a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Department of Government and Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University in 2010-2011. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of the politics of race, comparative politics and public policy.

Dr. Thompson’s book manuscript, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census, is a comparative study of how and why the United States, Great Britain and Canada developed racial classifications on their national censuses, tracing the changing nature of the census. She is also working on a project that examines the rise and fall of affirmative action policies and programs in higher education in comparative context. Dr. Thompson’s research has appeared in a number of scholarly journals and she was recently awarded the 2011 Governor General of Canada’s Academic Gold Medal.