ABOUT TASSELI MCKAY

Tasseli McKay is Assistant Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and core faculty in the UNC Center for Health Equity Research. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology at Duke University (under mentor Christopher Wildeman) and a social scientist in the Transformative Research Unit for Equity at RTI International.

Dr. McKay serves as principal investigator on the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-funded project, “Institutional Contact and Family Violence in an Era of Mass Incarceration.”

She holds a doctorate in social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an M.P.H. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University.

Previously, Dr. McKay worked on the Multi-site Family Study of Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering, a mixed-method longitudinal study of two thousand families affected by incarceration. This culminated in her first book: Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019) with Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir.

McKay’s most recent book, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power: The Case for Reparations for Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022), finds that the steep direct costs of mass-scale imprisonment are far overshadowed by its hidden costs and harms, many of which have been kept out of sight by women’s labor. She argues that reparations to Black Americans are critical to any effort to bring mass incarceration to an end.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Detailed information on research portfolio, publications, and background is available in the curriculum vitae.