Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
Senior Research Associate
Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft is senior research associate in carceral studies at the Institute for Social Concerns. He directs the Mass Incarceration Research Lab, which focuses on alternatives to incarceration that reimagine the concepts of guilt and moral responsibility and produce more ethical, sustainable, and logistically grounded responses to harm.
Sokolsky-Tifft’s research centers on the history and political theory of guilt from the late 19th and early 20th century through to today—in particular on the possibility that we might dramatically reimagine the understanding of guilt and responsibility that dominates our political, legal, and cultural worlds. He is currently working on a new book project, Reconceiving Guilt: Guilt, Collective Responsibility, and Political Agency in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which traces the history of guilt in the early to late 20th century from the United States, Modern Europe, North Africa, and the Caribbean, building on political theory, philosophy, and decolonial history as well as contemporary abolitionist thought and the growing field of critical carceral studies.
He has received the Bowdoin Prize at Harvard for best undergraduate essay in the English language and the Prince Consort & Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal at Cambridge for best doctoral dissertation in history, having received his Ph.D. and M.Phil from Cambridge University. He has taught in prisons in the United States and England as well as at Cambridge and Harvard and has written and spoken across the United States and Europe about criminal justice, moral responsibility, Caribbean political philosophy, critical theory, mass incarceration, and restorative and transformative justice.