معرفی
Holly Foster is a Professor of Sociology and Chancellor EDGES Fellow at Texas A&M University, with a visiting appointment at the American Bar Foundation (2025-26). Her work focuses on mass incarceration’s societal impacts, particularly on families and children of incarcerated individuals, blending quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. She holds leadership roles in the American Sociological Association, including past-chair of the Children & Youth Section and current chair-elect of the Crime, Law & Deviance Section.
Education: PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. Research interests include justice reform, violence exposure, social inequality, and health outcomes linked to parental incarceration. Her studies explore how incarceration disrupts family systems, perpetuating intergenerational marginalization. She also examines violence exposure’s lifelong effects and policy solutions to mitigate these harms.
Key research themes include: 1) how prison-family interfaces exacerbate racialized inequality, 2) children’s rights in carceral contexts, and 3) opioid crisis intersections with incarceration. Her work bridges academia and policy via collaborations with nonprofits aiding incarcerated women and their families.
Awards include the 2019-2022 Chancellor EDGES Fellowship and a 2015 21st Century America Scholar award. Notable contributions include a forthcoming NYU Press book analyzing prison-family dynamics and a 2020 paper in Social Science Research on paternal incarceration’s educational impacts.
Teaching spans criminology, social problems, and gender studies. Community engagement includes board service with a literacy-focused nonprofit for incarcerated women and their children. Her research consistently links empirical findings to actionable policy reforms targeting systemic inequities.
