Gillian Slee is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. She studies the experiences of people involved with and working within critical state systems that disproportionately serve or supervise poor Americans. Her research to date has focused on systems with far-reaching consequences: the public defender system, child protective services, and the parole system. With each of her projects, Gillian aims to humanize key state processes and, in so doing, to demonstrate how institutions’ relational dynamics shape inequality. Her research interests include poverty, justice, ethnography, and policy. Her work is published in Politics & Society, Social Service Review, and Theory and Society.

Gillian is a recipient of Princeton’s Centennial and Marion J. Levy, Jr. fellowships. Her dissertation research was recently recognized with a university-wide Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship. She graduated from Harvard College in 2016 with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. In 2017, Gillian earned her M.Phil. degree in Criminology at the University of Cambridge where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. Gillian is an affiliate of Princeton’s Eviction Lab.