Jennifer Carlson

Jennifer Carlson, PhD
Founding Director
Center for the Study of Guns in Society

Jennifer Carlson is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Guns in Society. She is a Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University and a MacArthur Fellow (Class of 2022). Her research examines the politics of guns in American life, broadly defined. She is the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (2015, Oxford University Press), Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Public Law Enforcement and the Politics of Race (2020, Princeton University Press), and Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of Democracy (2023, Princeton University Press). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, PBS, NPR, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and other national outlets. She is currently working on an NSF-funded project on gun violence survivors that examines the social, political, legal, and financial fall-out of surviving gun violence in America.