Dr. Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Trained as a sociologist, she uses qualitative methods to study women’s experiences of punishment in the U.S. criminal legal system.
Her book, under contract with the University of California Press, is based on a 12-month ethnography of religious life inside a state women’s prison. 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. Her latest project examines inequality in community supervision based on interviews with women on probation.
Her 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, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
She earned my B.A. in Sociology and French from Georgetown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
“In This Place Called Prison: Women's Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment” (Book Talk)