About Betsy

Author, scholar, and activist Betsy Hartmann addresses critical national and global challenges in her books, articles, and public appearances. Her new novel Last Place Called Home is a fast-paced, multilayered thriller that explores the high human costs of the opioid crisis and war on drugs. She is the author of the feminist classic Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness.

Betsy began her career researching and writing about rural poverty and foreign aid in South Asia. The New Internationalist described her first book A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village (co-authored with James K. Boyce) as “beautifully written.” From 1988 until 2016 she taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where she directed the Population and Development Program.  She became a well-known educator, commentator and advocate on women’s rights, population, environment, migration, and security concerns. In the wake of 9/11, she co-edited the anthology Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties.

Betsy is also the author of two political thrillers on the Far Right. Set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and in Germany, her first novel The Truth About Fire is about a neo-Nazi bioterrorist plot. Eerily prescient, her second novel Deadly Election is about an attempt to undermine American democracy during a hotly contested presidential election.

Betsy has consulted for the United Nations Environment Program and UN Women, and in spring 2015 was a Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair in New Delhi, India. In 2012 and 2018 she was the recipient of a Mesa Refuge writing residency in Point Reyes, California. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, and French television and is a frequent public speaker and radio guest. Her articles and op-eds have appeared in diverse popular, policy and scholarly venues. Recently, she has been interviewed by the Washington Post, Guardian, Le Monde, and other prominent news outlets on the threats posed by Far Right environmentalism.

Betsy’s papers, including those from her decades-long involvement in the international women’s health movement and in environmental justice and immigrant rights advocacy in the US, are now archived in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College.

Betsy received her BA in South Asian Studies magna cum laude from Yale University and her PhD in development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is now a professor emerita at Hampshire College. She lives in western Massachusetts.