Vesla Weaver
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Phone: 434-982-2969
Vesla Mae Weaver (PhD Harvard 2007) is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on race and politics, American political development, and social policy. Weaver is currently at work on her third book project, Punitive State: The Creation of the American Civic Underclass, with Amy Lerman. The book is the first to explore how the growth of the carceral state has altered citizens’ experience of government, and to examine the consequences of these developments for the health and future of American democracy. Her book manuscript, Frontlash: Civil Rights, the Carceral State, and the Transformation of American Politics, under contract with Cambridge University Press, uncovers a connection between the movement for civil rights and the development of punitive criminal justice. The book grows out of her dissertation, winner of the Best Dissertation Award in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics given by the American Political Science Association. Weaver recently completed another book forthcoming with Princeton University Press, Transforming the American Racial Order, on how the growth of 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 National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Brookings Institution and is published in the American Political Science Review, Daedalus, Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, Social Forces, and Studies in American Political Development.