Congratulations to
Daniel LaChance, who joins the
Emory University Department of History this fall as an Assistant Professor. From the History Department website:
Daniel LaChance joins the Department of History in the Fall of 2013.
His work examines the sources, meaning, and effects of the “punitive
turn” in the United States, the ratcheting up of incarceration and other
forms of harsh punishment in the late 20th century. Articles he has written on this topic have been appeared in the journals Law and Social Inquiry and Punishment and Society.
In 2011, his dissertation, “Condemned to Be Free: The Cultural Life of
Capital Punishment in the United States, 1945-Present” won the
University of Minnesota’s Best Dissertation Award in the Arts and
Humanities and was one of two finalists for the Distinguished
Dissertation Award given by the National Council of Graduate Schools.
The work, currently being revised for publication as a book by the
University of Chicago Press, examines the decline of the American death
penalty in the years following World War II, its revival in the 1970s,
and its subsequent use over the past thirty years. In it, he argues that
shifting ideas about freedom are embedded in the way that Americans
have talked about and used capital punishment.
Dr. LaChance earned his B.A. in English from Carleton College and his
Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities. Prior to his appointment to Emory, he was an Assistant Professor
of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Professor LaChance will be on leave in 2013-14. He will be the Law
and Humanities Fellow in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton
University. While at Princeton, he will be revising his book manuscript
and embarking on a new project: a legal, cultural, and intellectual
history of the deinstitutionalization of those classified as mentally
disabled and mentally ill in the United States.
