Thomas Birmingham is an investigative reporter, fact-checker and movement journalist. He is currently the Research Fellow at In These Times magazine and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Thomas’ entry into investigative work came at his public high school’s newspaper, where his work prevented a homophobic local pastor from winning a seat on the school board. At Yale, Thomas chose to move from city hall beat reporting to instead take on his own long-form investigations: these pieces went on to win the Scot Haller Award and the Schubart Prize for Journalism.
While at Yale, Thomas interned at the Louisville Courier Journal, where he frequently broke news on housing, police misconduct and city politics. His investigation into unlivable conditions at a government-funded housing nonprofit in a historically overlooked, primarily Black neighborhood resulted in high-profile city council hearings against the nonprofit.
His early investigative work also includes major features in The Appeal and The New Haven Independent. His work for the Appeal revealed that 100% of people convicted with an archaic murder statute in St. Louis were Black, while his work for the Independent has sparked widespread reforms to the city of New Haven’s housing code enforcement.
After graduating from Yale, Thomas interned at both In These Times and The Nation, where he has since been published regularly at both outlets. During both internships, he pitched pieces that eventually ran as feature housing investigations in print:
“As Corporate Landlords Spread, a Mold Epidemic Takes Root”: This investigation, for which Thomas was a 2025 Livingston Award finalist, was instrumental in the formation of a wave of tenant unions at the featured landlord’s properties across the country in a first-of-its-kind campaign.
“The Eviction Kings”: This investigation, Thomas’ most recent work, revealed that a major U.S. landlord unleashing rent hikes and eviction filings across the South is also owned by an Israeli company with financial ties to West Bank settlements and the IDF.
Just one year after his own internship at In These Times, the magazine hired him as the inaugural Research Fellow, his current role, in which he fact-checks the magazine’s most sensitive and expansive investigations, supervises the internship program and writes regularly for the magazine as a housing reporter.
In his freelance work, he has served as a research assistant on a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman and fact-checked the 2026 book How to Sell a Genocide from Citations Needed host Adam Johnson. In his free time, he hangs out with, in no particular order, his cat and his boyfriend.