I’m an Assistant Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Trained as a sociologist, I use qualitative methods to study women’s experiences of punishment in the U.S. criminal legal system.
My book, In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment, is a 12-month ethnography of religion inside a state women’s prison (University of California Press, April 2023). Another project explores the challenges of women's reentry from jail and prison based on 48 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated women in St. Louis, MO. My latest project examines inequality in community supervision based on interviews with women on probation.
My research has received recognition and awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. My work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the Louisville Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Religious Research Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, the University of Missouri Research Board, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
I earned my B.A. in Sociology and French from Georgetown University and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.