Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Prison Education Program at New York University has offered three Postdoctoral Fellowships to date. This fellowship is open to scholars across disciplines whose research focuses on issues germane to prison studies, prison education and social impacts of incarceration and criminal punishment. Fellows teach two undergraduate courses per year, one of which is held at Wallkill Correctional Facility. In addition, fellows assist in planning and administering public programming and participate in other activities of PEP.
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Debanjan Roychoudhury
2022-2024 NYU Prison Education Postdoctoral Fellow
Debanjan Roychoudhury received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022, where he was a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellow. Roychoudhury’s dissertation project, “Southside, We Outside: Policing and Placemaking in Historic Jamaica, Queens, New York” was supported by the University of California Office of the President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship and the UCLA Institute of American Cultures’ Predoctoral Fellowship with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. Roychoudhury is a Queens native and received a Posse Foundation Full-Tuition Scholarship to attend Middlebury College, where he graduated with a B.A. in sociology in 2016. He also participated in the Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative Summer Research-Early Identification Program and Creating Connections Consortium (C3) at Columbia University in 2015. His work has been published by Routledge and in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.
Email: dr3571@nyu.edu
Chloe Haimson
2022-2023 NYU Prison Education Postdoctoral Fellow
Chloe Haimson received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in June 2022. Her research investigates how people experience the reach of the criminal legal system and how it extends its reach beyond incarceration. Chloe does this by studying surveillance and punishment in the era of decarceration, as well as the experiences of formerly incarcerated people and parole agents. Her dissertation focused on the decisions parole agents make during their everyday work routines, how these choices influence the trajectories of individuals on parole after prison, and their consequences for the expansion of punishment in the U.S. Chloe also studies the rising role of algorithms in this process, as well as their implications for surveillance and the provision of prison reentry support.
Email: chloe.haimson@nyu.edu
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
2019-2020 NYU Prison Education Postdoctoral Fellow
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs received her Ph.D. in Geography with a certificate in American Studies from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research and teaching is situated within work on the carceral state; racial capitalism; Black, feminist, and queer geographies; social movements and grassroots organizing; and the US South. She is currently working on her first book manuscript which tracks the dialectical relationship between the multiscalar formation and contestation of the Louisiana carceral state from the 1970s to the present day. Her writing has been published in a broad range of academic and activist venues including Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Critical Criminology, Southern Spaces, Monthly Review Online, The Abolitionist, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (University of California Press) and Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (forthcoming University of Georgia Press). In the fall of 2020, she will join the faculty of the University of Kentucky as an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies.
E-mail: lph242@nyu.edu
Zhandarka Kurti
2018-2019 NYU Prison Education Postdoctoral Fellow
Zhandarka Kurti is a Bronx native. She studies the historical and contemporary transformations of punishment and social control. Her overall research focuses on the relationship between penal practices and institutions and wider social, economic and political changes. Zhandarka’s dissertation examined the role that lower criminal courts, probation and third party community supervision play in the criminalization of black and Latino youth in the South Bronx. Her current research projects explore the politics of criminal justice reforms and the role of parole in the lives of formerly incarcerated people and their families. Zhandarka is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.