Gillian Slee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on understanding and ameliorating inequality in American state processes. To this end, she has studied issues and institutions with far-reaching consequences: public defense, eviction, child protective services, and parole.

Her projects ask questions such as: How do interactions and relationships shape outcomes for people involved in large government systems? What (or who) drives bureaucrats’ discretion? How does material hardship influence the exercise of rights and citizenship?

With each of her projects, Slee aims to humanize key state processes and demonstrate how institutions’ relational dynamics shape inequality. She uses a range of methods—ethnography, in-depth interviews, and statistics—and has published her work in Criminology, Theory and Society, Social Service Review, Politics & Society, and Journal of Marriage and Family.

Slee completed her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University in 2024. She earned her M.Phil. in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. Slee graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. She completed her postdoc at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), where Slee was the Gerhard Casper Fellow in Rule of Law. Her research has been recognized with Centennial, Charlotte Elizabeth Procter, Marion J. Levy, Jr., and P.E.O. Scholar fellowships.