Zhandarka Kurti, PhD

About

Dr. Zhandarka Kurti is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Kurti received her PhD degree in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research explores race, class, gender and criminalization, probation and mass supervision and contemporary politics of criminal justice reforms.

Her research and teaching are informed by an interdisciplinary approach that brings together critical scholarship on policing, prisons and social control to place criminal justice system transformations within the wider socio-historical, economic and political forces that shape American life.

Before coming to Loyola, Dr. Kurti was an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2019-2021). She was also a postdoctoral fellow at New York University’s Prison Education Program where she taught sociology courses to incarcerated students at Wallkill Correctional Facility.

Degrees

2018      Ph.D., Sociology, Binghamton University (SUNY)

2008      M.A., World-Historical Sociology, Binghamton University (SUNY)

Professional & Community Affiliations

2016-Present American Sociological Association

2014- Present American Society of Criminology

2015- Present Eastern Sociological Society

Courses Taught

Introduction to Criminal Justice  

Juvenile Delinquency 

Race, Ethnicity, and Criminal Justice 

Punishment and Society

Carceral Studies

Selected Publications

Kurti, Zhandarka 2021. “Police Power After Black Lives Matter” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. Special Issue: Police Power and the Fabrication of Social Order: The Critique of Police in the Twenty-first Century.

Kurti, Zhandarka 2021. “Starting a Dialogue: From Radical Criminology to Critical Resistance: An Interview with Tony Platt," Special issue of Journal of World Systems Research (Capitalist World Economy in Crisis: Policing, Pacification and Legitimacy) August 2021

Kurti, Zhandarka and Jarrod Shanahan. 2018. “Rebranding Mass Incarceration: The Lippman Commission and ‘Carceral Devolution’ in New York City” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order 45 (2/3) pp. 23-50.

Kurti, Zhandarka and Odilka Santiago 2019. “Central Park Five Syllabus: A Supplementary Reading List.” with Odilka Santiago Abolition Journal https://abolitionjournal.org/central-park-five-syllabus/

Kurti, Zhandarka 2018. “Probation and Second Chances in the Era of the Jobless Future” Brooklyn Rail. https://brooklynrail.org/2018/03/field-notes/Second-Chances-in-the-Era-of-the-Jobless-Future