FACULTY PROFILE
Dr. Jarrod Shanahan studies the social history of punishment and
control in the United States and collective struggles to build a better world.
Dr. Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took
New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022), winner of the 2023 New York
City Book Award, and Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of
Rebellion, Reform, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press, 2025). He is the
co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America's
Punishment System (Reaktion/Field Notes, 2022); City Time: On
Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025); and Skyscraper
Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket,
2025). He is an editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity: A
Noel Ignatiev Reader (Verso, 2022), and was a founding editor of the
journal Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.
Dr. Shanahan's writing has appeared in numerous publications
including The Nation, Social Justice, Race & Class, Prison Journal, Los
Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacobin, Vice,
Urban Omnibus, New Inquiry, Truthout, Ill Will, End
Notes, Inquest, Insurgent Notes, Three-Way Fight, Hellgate,
and Gothamist. He also co-authored chapters in the anthologies The
George Floyd Uprising (PM Press, 2023) and Three-Way Fight:
Revolutionary Politics and Anti-Fascism (PM Press, 2024).
Dr. Shanahan's research has been featured and reviewed by
numerous publications including the New York Times, Times of
London, Washington Post, New York Review of Books, London
Review of Books, The Nation, Journal of Urban Affairs, Social
Justice, Crime Media Culture, Labor, Public Seminar, Inquest,
Vital City, The Metropole, Theoretical Criminology, The Journal of Urban
History, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, New York Daily News, and the New
York Post.