Department of Criminal Justice

Bonnie Ernst is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. She is a historian of gender, race, and punishment in the United States. Her first book, Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons (NYU Press, 2023), analyzes how twentieth-century women’s movements sparked protest, organizing, and reform that was led by incarcerated women and coalitions of attorneys and activists. Focusing on prisons in Michigan, the book traces how incarcerated women fought for civil rights and human rights during the rise of mass imprisonment. Her current research examines how Black women became ensnared in convict leasing and contested unjust punishment practices in the early twentieth century. Ernst’s scholarship emphasizes the perspectives of incarcerated people and the legacies of racial oppression and gendered harm in the criminal legal system.

Ernst holds degrees from the University of Chicago, the University of Oxford, and Northwestern University, where she received her Ph.D. in American History in 2018.