Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University
Erin Kelly grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. She earned her undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford University; in further pursuit of philosophy, she then went to Columbia University for graduate study before moving to Harvard University, where she earned her PhD. Her research interests are in moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of law, with a focus on questions about justice. She has developed a particular emphasis on criminal law, moral responsibility and theories of punishment. Her current work aims, among other things, to develop philosophical conceptions of reparative and transformative justice as alternatives to retributive accounts of punishment. She has a non-academic interest in music, film, the outdoors, and two young adult daughters.
Erin won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in the biography category for “Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South” (2022), which she co-authored with Winfred Rembert, the biography’s subject. Rembert, who died in 2021, received the prize posthumously.
The Pulitzer Board described Rembert and Kelly’s book as “a searing first-person illustrated account of an artist’s life during the 1950s and 1960s in an unreconstructed corner of the Deep South, an account of abuse, endurance, imagination and aesthetic transformation."
Erin has been a treasured friend for many years. We collaborated on a range of programs, most noteworthy, our common concern for abolishing the death penalty, https://www.tuftsgloballeadership.org/calendar/confronting-death-penalty, work with the Petra Foundation, http://petrafoundation.org/, The IGL Innocence International Project, https://www.tuftsgloballeadership.org/program/innocence-international and establishing the Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and John Artis Archive at Tufts.
Erin is currently working to engage and activate the Archive with the Tufts University Prison Initiative (TUPIT), and the emerging Tufts academic minor in Carceral Studies.
This project is very much a part of the Trebuchet's ongoing criminal justice initiatives. https://www.the-trebuchet.org/criminal-justice