She earned her BA in political science at the University of California-Irvine, and her PhD in government at Cornell University. Dr. Rivers’ teaching and research interests include African-American politics and political thought, and civil and voting rights law. She is the author of The Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Voting Rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court (University of Michigan Press, 2012), and recently had a book chapter published in the 2-volume Minority Voting in the U.S. (Praeger, 2016). Her current work is on mass incarceration, particularly felon disenfranchisement laws and prison-based gerrymanders. She has also taken an interest in prison education and recently taught a course on law and politics at Stateville Correctional Center, as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at DePaul.”