Vanessa R Panfil Editor & Author

Dana Peterson received her PhD in Criminal Justice from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is currently Associate Dean and Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany (New York).  She teaches and conducts research primarily on youth gangs and gang prevention, youth violence and juvenile treatment, and the ways in which sex and gender structure each of these.  She co-edited (with Frank van Gemert and Inger-Lise Lien) the third Eurogang Network book Street Gangs, Migration, and Ethnicity (2008, Willan Publishing); has co-authored numerous articles and book chapters (including a forthcoming chapter on sex, gender, and gangs, co-authored with Vanessa R. Panfil, in The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime, edited by Rosemary Gartner and William McCarthy); and recently co-authored a book with long-time friends and colleagues Finn-Aage Esbensen, Terrance J. Taylor, and Adrienne Freng titled Youth Violence: Sex and Race Differences in Offending, Victimization, and Gang Membership (2010, Temple University Press).  And for the past four years, she has had the pleasure and honor of serving on the University at Albany Advisory Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed (LGBTQI) Issues, Co-Chairing the committee for the past three years.

Vanessa R. Panfil received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University at Albany and is currently a post-doctoral associate in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University (Newark, NJ). Her research explores how gender and sexuality shape individuals’ experiences with gangs, crime, victimization, and the criminal and juvenile justice systems. For her dissertation, she designed and conducted a partially ethnographic, in-depth interview study of self-identified gay gang members, in order to analyze the complex relationships between the commission of crime and/or gang membership and the construction of gay and masculine identities. Her published and forthcoming works from that line of inquiry explicitly challenge existing cultural and criminological assumptions regarding gay men. Other forthcoming papers focus on the gendered experiences of both female and male gang members, as well as the promise of qualitative methods for studying queer populations and contributing to criminological theory. She also highly values and has experience with program evaluation. Finally, for over ten years, she has volunteered for LGBTQ advocacy organizations, including those that provide services to at-risk youth and those that seek to improve the quality of life for students, staff, and faculty in higher education.