Andrew Byrne Keefe

Andrew Byrne Keefe

Doctoral Student in Sociology & Social Policy
Andrew Byrne Keefe

Research Interests: Inequality; Sociology of Punishment; Criminal Law and Procedure; Political Economy; Comparative-Historical Sociology; Social Theory.

Andrew Keefe is a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy and a third-year law student at Harvard Law School.  His research uses mixed and historical methods to examine how people charged with crimes experience policing, criminal court, and prison and how their experiences have varied by race and class, across place, and over time.  His dissertation, a comparative-historical study of criminal procedure in the British Empire, relies on legal records and other original sources to compare the due process rights of defendants, both by law and in practice, in America and five other cases between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Drawing on research into global and transnational sociology, the sociology of slavery, and postcolonial development, the dissertation endeavors to generate sociolegal accounts of plea bargaining and other procedures as well as an original theory of the political economy of criminal procedure.  In addition to this research, Andy is working on an ethnography of organizations involved in social movements for criminal justice reform and on two collaborative quantitative projects.  The first leverages national surveys of incarcerated people and prisons in the United States since the 1970s to investigate how and why the severity of incarceration has varied across jurisdictions.  The second, a cross-national conjoint survey experiment, compares how respondents from the U.S. and other countries express sentencing preferences for people convicted of serious crimes.

Previous Degrees

MPhil honors distinction in Early Modern History, University of Dublin, September 2022

AM magna cum laude in Sociology, Harvard University, May 2019

BA summa cum laude in Linguistics and Media & Cultural Studies, Macalester College, May 2013

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518 William James Hall

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