Adaner Usmani is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies. His research is driven by some simple questions about the distribution of flourishing and suffering in modern societies. He is also interested in the often-fraught relationship between our normative commitments and our empirical work. Most of his ongoing work is on American mass incarceration. With John Clegg, he is working on a book in which they seek to explain American punishment by studying it in comparative and historical context. The book is based on a multi-year effort to collect comparative and historical data on prisons, policing, penal spending and related series. With Chris Lewis, he is working on a book explaining what is wrong with mass incarceration if the standard story of its origins is false. Most of his research uses computational and quantitative methods, which he has taught at the graduate level. That said, he retains a keen interest in the comparative historical method, and in qualitative social science more generally. 

2023-24 Courses

Social Studies 98wa: Crime, Punishment, and Policing in an Unequal America (Fall)
Social Studies 98wb: Inequality: What is to be done? (Spring)
Sociology 1101: The Historical Sociology of Inequality (Spring)