Dr. Kolleen Duley

Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies

Kolleen is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh and a practicing attorney seeking justice for people who have been imprisoned in New York State. Kolleen received a Ph.D. (doctorate in philosophy) from the UCLA Gender Studies Department and J.D. (doctorate in law) from the UCLA School of Law, earning specializations in Critical Race Studies and Public Interest Law and Policy. Kolleen’s dissertation, “Raze the Bar[s]: ‘Gender Responsive’ Prison Reform, Criminalizing Race, and Abolishing the Carceral State” tracks the study of gender, race, and criminality and critiques problematic mobilizations of gender and the plight of people in women’s prisons in prison law and reform efforts.

Kolleen is committed to transformative feminist pedagogy, abolition feminist movement building, and all-around rabble-rousing. Kolleen has contracted with University of North Carolina Press to write Theorizing in the Flesh: Queer Carceral Monstrosities and Transformative Abolition Praxis, a book which examines how incarcerated people use their bodies to survive imprisonment. Theorizing in the Flesh proffers alternative analytics for thinking through incarcerated people’s entanglements with criminalized practices labeled abject, such as self-harm and transgressive sex and imagines how to build a world without prisons and other carceral institutions. Kolleen’s academic and social justice endeavors reflect a longstanding commitment to engage in strategies — following direct calls from incarcerated people — that address the suffering of people inside without expanding the reach (indeed shrinking the scope) of the carceral state.

Kolleen lives in the N.Y. Adirondack mountains on a small organic farm growing vegetables and two humans for the next generation of feminist freedom fighters.