Research

My research centers on the lived experience of the liminal spaces of the carceral state and the long origins of mass incarceration. My deeply historical but interdisciplinary work is motivated by my commitments to social justice and human dignity. My hope is that readers will come away from my work with a sensitivity to the complexities and harms of mass incarceration.

This is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise and Mass Incarceration is out now in hardcover with University of Pennsylvania Press. A history of jailing in Chicago, it focuses on how incarcerated people and their allies resisted and contested the transformation of American jails in the postwar era.

With John Bardes, I am co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History, under contract with Cambridge University Press. Spanning the colonial to the contemporary, this collaboratively-written synthesis will bring together seventeen groundbreaking authors to reinterpret America’s carceral past. The volume is expected in 2026.

A new research project on disaster and incarceration in the 20th and 21st century builds on my interest in the liminal spaces of the carceral state. I am currently completing essays for two anthologies in African American urban and political history. There are always two or three other ideas that I’m kicking around, so if you’re an agent or editor, please reach out.

I am the author of a 2016 dissertation, Jail America: The Reformist Origins of the Carceral State. Other publications include a 2009 Masters thesis, “Grassroots Power: The Utah Eagle Forum, 1972-2009” and contributions to ABC-CLIO’s reference volume The Encyclopedia of the Sixties: A Decade of Culture and Counterculture. An essay on the oral histories I conducted as part of my MA research, “The Utah Eagle Forum: Legitimizing Political Activism as Women’s Work” was published in Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West, an anthology from the University of Arizona Press.