Jane Palmer

Jane Palmer is a faculty fellow in PERIL’s gendered violence division. Jane is an associate professor and the chair of the department of justice, law & criminology at American University. Her research focuses on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of gendered violence; legal, policy, and community-based responses to gendered violence; barriers and facilitators of help-seeking for survivors of gendered violence; measurement and methodological issues in quantitative and community-based research; and advancing anti-racist practices in academia and the non-profit sector. Her research is community-engaged and action-oriented.

Before coming to AU for her Ph.D., Dr. Palmer was the executive director of RAVEN, a domestic violence perpetration intervention and youth violence prevention organization in St. Louis. As a social worker, she worked in paid and volunteer positions for more than a decade in Chicago and St. Louis in violence prevention and intervention with youth and adults.

Dr. Palmer is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Research Leader, a Non-Resident Fellow in Community-Engaged Methods at the Urban Institute, and the Board Treasurer for the Chicago Freedom School. She has a B.A. in sociology from Smith College, a Master of Social Work (M.S.W.) from University of Illinois-Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Justice, Law & Society with a concentration in public policy from American University. Her hobbies include sewing, creative writing, and spending quality time with friends and family.