Category: Alumni Authors

Title:In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment

Author: Rachel Ellis (C'10)
Date Published: April 26, 2023

In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.

(University of California Press, 2023)

View Book Listing >

More News

two people hugging in front of a city where the sun is setting

A young couple confronts the start of Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s, and a daughter searches for truth twenty years later. (Grand Central / Hachette, 2022) View Book…

men play baseball - on a pennant are the words

The book explores Organized Baseball during the Great Depression, World War II, and the immediate postwar years. (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) View Book Listing >…

a dark blue background with the words

A Pirate’s Life for She tells the story of 16 women who sailed alongside—and sometimes commanded—their male counterparts. (Chicago Review Press, 2019) View Book Listing > Read more…