Name: Chelsea Farrell
URI Position: Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Email: c_farrell@uri.edu
Preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome several new professors beginning in the fall 2019 semester. Assistant Professor Chelsea Farrell, Ph.D., joins the Criminology and Criminal Justice program. She recently earned her doctorate in Criminology and Justice Policy from Northeastern University. Her dissertation, Putting Intersectionality into Context: Extending our Understanding of Gender, Race, and Place to Investigative Police Stops, assesses the independent and interactive effects of gender, race, and place on proactive police-citizen interactions.
Dr. Farrell’s research rests on the premise that the causes and consequences of human behavior are racialized, gendered, and contextualized. “I am eager to continue my work,” Farrell says, “on how characteristics of the individual and neighborhood shape the ways in which police and citizens interact.” In her new appointment, she also looks forward to conducting an organizational culture assessment of New England police departments that will examine how officer race, gender, and sexual orientation impacts the work environment. She also plans to assess how peer exposure to violence impacts individual behavior, and examine the impact of investigative police stops on delinquent behavior. In harmony with her research focuses, Farrell looks forward to teaching courses such as Crime & Delinquency and Race, Crime, & Justice during the upcoming school year.
Farrell is drawn to URI’s interdisciplinary emphases and structures. “My style of teaching, as well as my research agenda,” she articulates, “draws from multiple disciplinary backgrounds. Drawing from more than one discipline allows students and faculty to be more informed on topics that cross disciplinary lines, which is particularly the case for topics within criminology and criminal justice.” URI’s Criminology and Criminal Justice program is new and rapidly growing, and Farrell is eager to be a part of its evolution and community. She looks forward to working with students and sharing engaging, multifaceted material with them—material that can shape them as scholars and as individuals. “Learning an expertise is important,” Farrell stresses. “However, it is also critical for students to leave college with a broader understanding of topics from various disciplines. This not only helps students during their career paths, but it also fosters critical evaluation and understanding in other aspects of life.”
~Written by Aria Mia Loberti, Communication Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science triple major
