Jennifer Tilton

Jennifer Tilton is a professor of race and ethnic studies at the University of Redlands. Her research focuses on the history of racial segregation in the United States and its impact on the criminal justice system, local politics, and children’s lives. She helps coordinate The Bridges That Carried Us Over Project: Documenting Black History in the Inland Empire and is a co-director of A People’s History of the Inland Empire, a community-based archiving and mapping project.

Tilton’s public history work is featured at the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California, Black Voice News, and on the A People’s History website. She has taught college courses in a local juvenile hall and at a California Rehabilitation Center and facilitates the Inland Empire Fair Chance Coalition, which advocates for removing barriers for people living with criminal convictions.

• Ph.D., American culture and anthropology, University of Michigan
• B.A., anthropology, Princeton University

• Professor, University of Redlands
• Board member, Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California
• Facilitator, Inland Empire Fair Chance Coalition

• A People’s History of the Inland Empire StoryMap Collection: A digital humanities mapping project documenting Inland Empire history. https://arcg.is/1Ha1vb
• Crossing the New Jim Crow color line: Confronting race in community service learning behind bars. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, winter 2021.
• Race, rage, and emotional suspects: Ideologies of social mobility confront the racial contours of mass incarceration. Special issue on children as emotional suspects, Children and Society, 2020.
• Rethinking youth voice and institutional power: Reflections from inside a service-learning partnership in a California juvenile hall. Children and Youth Services Review 35(8): 1189–1196, 2013.
• Tilton, Jennifer. Dangerous or Endangered?: Race and the Politics of Youth in Urban America. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

• Juneteenth Freedom Award, Redlands Unity in the Community
• Innovative Teaching Award, University of Redlands