Stone Inequality Book Talk: Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University. He is also an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, founding director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, and Scientific Director of the ongoing Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+). He taught previously at the University of Chicago. Professor Sampson is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society of Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and, as Corresponding Fellow, the British Academy. He is the former President of the American Society of Criminology and in 2011 he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. His research and teaching cover a variety of areas including crime and criminal justice, the life course and social change, neighborhood effects, collective civic engagement, inequality, and urban social structure.

Erin Kelly is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. She earned her undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford University; in further pursuit of philosophy, she then went to Columbia University for graduate study before moving to Harvard University, where she earned her PhD. Her research interests are in moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of law, with a focus on questions about justice. She has developed a particular emphasis on criminal law, moral responsibility and desert, and theories of punishment. Her current work aims, among other things, to develop philosophical conceptions of reparative and transformative justice as alternatives to retributive accounts of punishment. She has been Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, where she taught Criminal Law. In 2025-26 she is a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Born in Baltimore, Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College. An award-winning scholar of African American political thought, political theory, and the politics of race and inequality, Brandon is the author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press). He is also the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT, 2018).

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and the Minnesota Population Center. A sociologist and demographer, she studies racial inequality in mortality in the historical and contemporary United States, and specializes in finding comparisons and metrics that illuminate the human meaning of mortality disparities. She has extensively researched the Covid-19 pandemic in Minnesota, where she also co-founded an award-winning community vaccination organization. She is also a demographic methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on population processes.