Rachel Ellis is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. She is also a Faculty Associate of the Maryland Population Research Center and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology. 

Using qualitative methods – especially ethnography and interviews – her research focuses on women's experiences of punishment and inequality in the United States. Dr. Ellis has focused on incarceration, reentry, probation, and state narratives behind criminal legal sanctions for women and children. She has also published on organizational theories of prisons and best practices in qualitative methodology. Her first book, In This Place Called Prison: Women's Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment, draws on a yearlong ethnography inside a U.S. women's prison to examine the contours of freedom and constraint offered by religion within an institution designed to punish (University of California Press, 2023). In This Place Called Prison has been recognized with awards from the American Society of Criminology, the American Sociological Association, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Current projects include a Russell Sage-funded interview study about women's experiences on probation and a mixed-methods study of the impacts of parental incarceration and state surveillance on the next generation.