Dana Peterson received her PhD in Criminal Justice from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and is currently Associate Dean and Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany (New York). She teaches and conducts research primarily on youth gangs and gang prevention, youth violence and juvenile treatment, and the ways in which sex and gender structure each of these. She co-edited (with Frank van Gemert and Inger-Lise Lien) the third Eurogang Network book
Street Gangs, Migration, and Ethnicity (2008, Willan Publishing); has co-authored numerous articles and book chapters (including a forthcoming chapter on sex, gender, and gangs, co-authored with Vanessa R. Panfil, in
The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime, edited by Rosemary Gartner and William McCarthy); and recently co-authored a book with long-time friends and colleagues Finn-Aage Esbensen, Terrance J. Taylor, and Adrienne Freng titled
Youth Violence: Sex and Race Differences in Offending, Victimization, and Gang Membership (2010, Temple University Press). And for the past four years, she has had the pleasure and honor of serving on the University at Albany Advisory Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed (LGBTQI) Issues, Co-Chairing the committee for the past three years.
Vanessa R. Panfil received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University at Albany and is currently a post-doctoral associate in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University (Newark, NJ). Her research explores how gender and sexuality shape individuals’ experiences with gangs, crime, victimization, and the criminal and juvenile justice systems. For her dissertation, she designed and conducted a partially ethnographic, in-depth interview study of self-identified gay gang members, in order to analyze the complex relationships between the commission of crime and/or gang membership and the construction of gay andmasculine identiti