29 Mar 2024
Professor Danielle Jefferis has been named the 2024 recipient of the Rev. Dr. Michael W. Combs Memorial Fund for Scholars of Equality and Justice Award for Faculty, presented by the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The Combs Award for Faculty recognizes faculty members whose teaching on issues pertaining to ethnicity, race, class, and nationality are innovative yet grounded. The recipient demonstrates disciplinary rigor and awareness of the need for methodologies and perspectives that challenge institutional problems on behalf of communities that are historically impacted.
Professor Jefferis’s research focuses on theories of punishment and the law and policy governing prison and detention, with an emphasis on the for-profit prison industry and immigration-related confinement. In 2023, she was part of a Nebraska research team awarded a $1M grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their work to launch a research and collaboration hub focused on the relationship between U.S. law and race in American History.