Christopher Muller

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Christopher Muller is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present, with a focus on how agricultural labor markets, migration, and struggles over land and labor have affected incarceration and racial and class inequality in incarceration.

At Radcliffe, Muller will work on a study examining how long-run patterns in the incarceration of Black Americans have been affected by the dynamics of exclusion and exploitation. The project’s primary aim is to explain why the Black incarceration rate was lower in the South than in the North for much of the 20th century, why it was lowest in the South’s cotton belt, and why it began to increase when it did.

Muller has been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar and has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, and Science and has received awards including the Roger V. Gould Prize and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. He earned his PhD in sociology from Harvard University.