Simon Balto is a scholar, writer, and teacher of History and African American Studies.

He is the author of the multi-award-winning Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). He is a regular contributor for The Guardian, and has written for multiple scholarly and popular publications, including TIME, The Washington Post, The Baffler, The Progressive, The Journal of American History, The Journal of African American History, American Quarterly, Journal of Urban History, and Labor, among others. His media appearances include live interviews on the BBC World News, CNBC, and Al-Jazeera, as well as dozens of interviews for print pieces published around the world. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after previously working at the University of Iowa and Ball State University. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and, most recently, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He is currently at work on two new major projects. The first, tentatively titled White Innocents: Terror, Racism, and Innocence in the Making of Modern America (under contract with Norton) is a history of white mob terrorism in the United States from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, and of how what Americans call the “criminal justice system” has variously refused to and proven incapable of reckoning with it. The second (under contract with Haymarket Books), titled “I am a Revolutionary”: The Political Life and Legacy of Fred Hampton, is a biography of the life and political afterlife of Fred Hampton, the brilliant organizer and leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was murdered by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department in 1969 at the age of twenty-one.