Tasseli McKay

Dr. Tasseli McKay is a researcher, author, and reparative policy scholar. Currently, she serves as a National Science Foundation research fellow in the Department of Sociology at Duke University.

Her most recent book, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power: The Case for Reparations for Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022), contends that the steep direct costs of mass-scale imprisonment are far overshadowed by its hidden costs and harms, many of which have been kept out of sight by women’s labor.

For ten years, Dr. McKay worked on the Multi-site Family Study of Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering, a mixed-method longitudinal study of two thousand families affected by incarceration. This culminated in her first book: Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019) with Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir.

Dr. McKay holds a PhD in social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in American Studies from Yale University.

She lives just outside of Durham, North Carolina with an expansive human and animal family.