Alumni Spotlight: Jen Carlson ’00

Jennifer Carlson attended the Indiana Academy from 1998 to 2000. Her time at the Academy was one of the most transformative academic experiences of her life, and the lessons she learned from Mr. Stuart, Mr. Rajca, Ms. Foltz, Mrs. Haynes and Ms. Cunningham have had a profound effect in shaping her life post-Academy.

After graduating from the Indiana Academy in 2000, Jennifer attended Dartmouth College, where she double majored in Mathematics and Sociology and graduated summa cum laude in 2004. After gaining exposure to sociological research through her senior thesis on death penalty politics in Texas, she decided to pursue a PhD in sociology at University of California, Berkeley. She received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support her graduate work in 2005, and pursued research on gender, conservative politics, policing and crime. Her dissertation focused on American gun politics, which she completed in 2013.

Jennifer is now an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Toronto Star, and the Detroit Free Press. Her book Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline examines the politics of gun carry, and it is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2015. Jennifer teaches courses on gun violence, gender, and policing, and she credits the Academy with instilling in her a strong commitment to mentorship and student learning.