Kirstine Taylor
Education
Ph.D., University of Washington (2015)
Research Areas
- Political Theory
- African American Political Thought
- American Political Development
- Race and American Politics
- Incarceration & Policing
- Public Law
Courses Taught
- POLS 4739: The Politics of Race
- POLS 4754/5754: Black Political Thought
- POLS 4751/5751: Critical Race Theory
51ĀŅĀ× Affiliations
About Dr. Taylor
Kirstine Taylor is an Associate Professor in Political Science and the Center for Law, Justice & Culture. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Washington, where she was also the Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality & Race.
Her research focuses on how racial inequality is sustained and reproduced in 20th and 21st century American politics, especially as it relates to the American carceral system: law & order politics, policing, prisons, and state violence. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Theory & Event, and Politics, Groups & Identities. Her forthcoming book, The Sunbelt Carceral State: Racial Capitalism, Black Civil Rights, and Crime Policy, analyzes the origins of the mass incarceration in the post-WWII U.S. South. It examines a critical transformation in southern carceral machinery when state governments dismantled central pillars of Jim Crow criminal punishmentāvagrancy laws and chain gangsāand built new and expansive carceral institutions in their place.
At 51ĀŅĀ×, she teaches The Politics of Race, Black Political Thought, Proseminar in Law, Justice, and Culture and other courses in the areas of law, racial politics, and political theory.