Research
Current projects
Books
Articles
I am currently a co-Principal
investigator on a National
Science Foundation ADVANCE PAID grant to study the transition between
associate and full professor for faculty (mostly) in the science,
engineering, and math disciplines [ADVANCE Partnerships for Adaptation,
Implementation, and Dissemination (PAID) Award: PROMOTE - Improving the
promotion to full processes at western public universities," Principal
investigators Kimberly A. Sullivan, Ann Austin, Beth A. Montelone, Dana
M. Britton, Cynthia Zoski. NSF Award #: HRD-0820273].
As of May, 2011 I have conducted 178 interviews with faculty on 13 campuses. Transcription and coding are ongoing. I expect early results from this project to be available during summer or fall 2011.
I am the author of The Gender of Crime (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). This book is intended to turn a gendered perspective on criminology, particularly with reference to definitions of crime, criminal offending, the criminal justice system, victimization, and work in the criminal justice system. This is the marketing blurb:
The Gender of Crime
introduces students to how gender shapes our understanding of every
aspect of
crime. Moving beyond criminological
theories and research that have often neglected gender, this dynamic
and
provocative book shows that gender is central to the definition,
prosecution,
and sentencing of crimes, that it shapes how victimization is
experienced and
understood, and that it structures the institutions of the criminal
justice
system and the experiences of workers within that system.
Discussing the intersections of race, class,
gender, and sexuality with crime and punishment, this book demonstrates
that
crime, victimization, and crime control are never generic – they are
instead
the produced and experienced by gendered (and race, and classed, and
sexualized) actors within contexts of social inequality.
This book highlights key concepts for
students and encourages them to think critically through a range of
compelling
real-life examples, from school violence to corporate crime. The
Gender of Crime provides essential reading for students of gender,
criminology, and criminal justice alike.
The book is available now - from Rowman & Littlefield, Amazon.com and the other usual places.
I am also th
e author of At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as
Gendered Organization (NYU Press, 2003). In this book,
I draw on interviews with 72 correctional officers working in five
men's and women's state and federal prisons to explore the ways that
gender structures the prison itself and work within it. Gender
was an integral element in the thinking of those who designed the
earliest prisons and reformatories, and it continues to structure life
in prisons today - for both inmates and workers. As officers, men
and women who have moved into prisons dominated by inmates and workers
of the opposite sex have had very different experiences - as in most
male dominated occupations, women have found integrating prison work in
men's prisons difficult (though often as a result of the attitudes of
coworkers and supervisors, rather than inmates). In contrast, men
working in women's prisons, like men in most female-dominated
occupations, have found their work environments far more
welcoming.
I am the editor of Gender and Prisons (Ashgate Press, 2005). I wrote the introductory essay and collected the pieces. This is the marketing blurb:
Prison is unquestionably one of the most sex-segregated
of all
social institutions. From the first incarnations of the carceral
project more than two centuries ago, reformers and penologists
earnestly turned their attention to the construction of 'Christian
gentlemen' and 'respectable ladies.' Vestiges of these projects remain
to the present day, though often in radically different forms.
Academic work exploring the construction of prison related gender has
been a relatively recent development within the last quarter century.
Included in this volume are twenty-two key articles exploring prison
history, the state and gendered social control, gender and work in
prisons and the gendered experience of incarceration. The introductory
essay places these areas in the context both of more conventional
sociologies of gender (highlighting both masculinities and
femininities) and traditional scholarship on the prison, arguing for a
return of this increasingly important social institution from the
instrumentalist domains of criminal justice to the heart of
sociological theorizing on topics of gender and social control.
Though I hope to include links to
published
works here
eventually, for now, here is a link to my
curriculum vitae (in pdf).