My research examines women’s experiences of punishment in the U.S. Major themes include religion, sexuality, and motherhood.
BOOK: RELIGION IN PRISON
In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment
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.
Published by the University of California Press, 2023.
RESEARCH ON WOMEN’S INCARCERATION
Branigan, Amelia, Rachel Ellis, Wade Jacobsen, and Anna Haskins. 2023. “System Management and Compensatory Parenting: Educational Involvement after Maternal Incarceration.” Criminology 61(3):482-517.
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Ellis, Rachel. 2023. “What Do We Mean By a ‘Hard-to-Reach’ Population? Legitimacy versus Precarity as Barriers to Access.” Sociological Methods & Research 52(3): 1556-1586.
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Ellis, Rachel. 2021. “Prisons as Porous Institutions.” Theory and Society 50(2):175-199.
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RELIGION AND PUNISHMENT, CONTINUED
Ellis, Rachel and Victoria Inzana. 2023. “Salvation Scripts: How Religion Matters for Women’s Desistance Narratives.” Justice Quarterly, online first.
Ellis, Rachel. 2021. “‘You’re not serving time, you’re serving Christ’: Protestant Religion and Discourses of Responsibilization in a Women’s Prison.” British Journal of Criminology 61(6): 1647-1664.
Press coverage: OMNIA Magazine
Ellis, Rachel. 2020. "Redemption and Reproach: Religion and Carceral Control in Action among Women in Prison." Criminology 58(4):747-772.
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Ellis, Rachel. 2018. "'It's Not Equality': How Race, Class, and Gender Construct the Normative Religious Self among Female Prisoners." Social Inclusion 6(2):181-191. (Special Issue)
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RELIGIOUS MEMBERSHIP, DEVIANCE, AND IDENTITY
Ellis, Rachel. 2017. “Silent Disagreement: Microinteractional Solutions to Moral Dissent among Catholic Converts.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(2):383-397.
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Ellis, Rachel. 2015. “Outreach and Exclusion: Jewish Denominational Marketing in the Early 20th Century.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54(1):38-56.
Student Paper Award, 2012, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
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PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Ellis, Rachel, with Taylor Kramer, Megan Arslanian, Jacob Abuelhawa, Anna Rose Barrack, Julia Caspero, Thomas Brittan-Powell, Sarah Justice, Isabel Sanfuentes, Gabrielle Vogel, Emily Mimi Yang, and Jessica Hom (undergraduate submissions, University of Maryland–College Park). 2021. “Engaged Pedagogy in the Criminology Classroom.” American Anthropologist online content.
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Ellis, Rachel. 2020. “Prison Labor in a Pandemic.” Contexts 19(4):90-91.
Ellis, Rachel. May 2020. “In Prison in a Pandemic: Gender Behind Bars.” The Gender Policy Report.
Read it here (open access)