Vesla Weaver

VESLA WEAVER (PhD, Harvard, Government and Social Policy) is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor in Racial Politics & Criminal Justice at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Weaver is broadly interested in understanding racial inequality in the United States, how state policies shape citizenship, and the political causes and consequences of the growth of the criminal justice system in the United States. Her book with Amy Lerman, Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, is concerned with the effects of increasing punishment and surveillance in America on democratic inclusion, particularly for the black urban poor. She is also the author of Frontlash: Civil Rights, the Carceral State, and the Transformation of American Politics (under contract with Cambridge), which uncovers a connection between the movement for civil rights and the development of punitive criminal justice. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order, which explores how multiracialism, immigration, the genomics revolution, and generational changes are reshaping the racial order in the United States (with Professors Jennifer Hochschild and Traci Burch). Weaver’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Brookings Institution. She has served on the Harvard/NIJ Executive Session on CommunityCorrections, the APSA Presidential Taskforce on Racial Inequality in the Americas, and the Center for Community Change’s Good Jobs for All initiative. She is at work on a new project on the politics of intra-racial class inequality with Jennifer Hochschild and another that will map patterns of citizenship and governance across cities and neighborhoods called the Faces of American Democracy.