Joanne Belknap received a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Michigan State University in 1986. She is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado. She is President-Elect of the American Society of Criminology and is primarily interested in the trajectory of trauma to offending, and has numerous scholarly publications, most of which involve violence against women and girls and incarcerated women and girls. Dr. Belknap is currently working on the fourth edition of her book, The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice. She has secured almost two million dollars in grant money to conduct research on women, girls, and crime. She has served on state advisory boards for female offenders and women in prison, on U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno's Violence Against Women Committee, gave expert testimony to the Warren Christopher Commission investigating the Rodney King police brutality incident in Los Angeles, and served as a pro bono advisor on criminal justice policy for the Obama presidential campaign. Dr. Belknap has won numerous research, teaching and service awards, and served as an Executive Board Member of the American Society of Criminology.
Dr. Belknap is the recipient of the 1997 national award "Distinguished Scholar of the Division on Women and Crime" of the American Society of Criminology, and won the student-nominated "University of Colorado Teaching Award" in 2001 for her class, Violence Against Women and Girls. She is the past Chair of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology. Dr. Belknap is the 2004 recipient of the "Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Award", the most prestigious teaching award at the University of Colorado, and the 2004 "Inconvenient Woman Award" from the American Society of Criminology for speaking out on behalf of college women reporting rapes. Dr. Belknap won "Best Article of 2008" in the journal Violence Against Women, and won the 2009 "Elizabeth Gee University of Colorado Award" for her research on women and girls. Recent and forthcoming empirical publications are about sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, incarcerated girls and women, and a gendered analysis of offending.
If you participated in Joanne's study at the Denver County Jail and would like to receive any of the findings thus far, please feel free to email her at joanne.belknap@colorado.edu
