Assistant Professor of Political Science
Allison P. Harris is assistant professor of political science at Yale University where she also co-directs (with Dara Strolovitch) the Center for the Study of Inequality. She studies American political institutions and the ways that intra- and inter-institutional dynamics impact societal inequality. She is particularly interested in how elite behavior drives these relationships in the criminal legal system. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in such journals as the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
Allison is currently working on a book project titled Diversity, Equity, and Injustice that explores how racial diversity among trial judges affects individual judges’ sentencing decisions and, ultimately, racial disparities in sentencing outcomes. In related research, she investigates the relationship between judges’ personal characteristics and their decisions. Allison is also a co-founder of the Expanding Engagement Lab, through which she and her coauthors conduct innovative experiments to identify successful methods for (re)engaging justice-impacted people into the political process.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, her A.B. from Brown University, and she was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.
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