Dr. Kathleen Belew, ‘Thoughts and Prayers: America in the Age of Mass Violence’

“In 2024…the number of children and teachers killed in school shootings surpassed not only military, but active police duty deaths. So our entire carceral and military apparatus had fewer fatalities than children and teachers in schools. And we’ve gone up since then. We’re on a steady inflection up.”

Our guest academic this week, Dr Kathleen Belew, is a historian of the present. She defines the current period in the United States as an “Age of Mass Violence” that begins in 1999 with Columbine — not because it was the first school shooting, but because it marked the start of treating school shootings as a “normal part” of American life.

“Thoughts and prayers,” Belew explains, “is a phrase that comes out of that moment. We can historicize it precisely to Columbine… At the time, ‘thoughts and prayers’ was sort of the deepest, most compassionate social response that we could come up with to the slaughter of children.”

Thoughts and Prayers is also the chilling title of her current research project — and the starting point for one of her central questions: why did this refrain come to stand in for political action?

In this conversation, we dissect how fear and suburban isolation have normalised gun violence, and why children have come to occupy a tragic central place in America’s culture of mass shootings. Belew reflects on the relationship between private violence and state power, the spiritual framing of mass violence, and the possibilities for reimagining community safety in an era defined by fear and fragmentation.

Throughout, we consider what it means to write a history of the present — and how historical thinking might help open pathways toward collective responsibility, hope, and change.

Kathleen Belew is Associate Professor of American Studies at Northwestern University. She is also an expert on the white power movement and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2019).

Co-hosts:
Dr Hugh Wood recently completed his PhD at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His research examines the relationship between private violence and American state building in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Megan Renoir is a PhD Candidate at Homerton College, Cambridge. She studies the relationship between Western property institutions, state development, and violence against minorities, including Indigenous dispossession.

Production by Daisy Semmler (MPhil 2025).