Dr. Anna Gunderson (PhD Emory University; MA Emory University; BA Arizona State University) is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research specializes in American politics, focusing on the politics of punishment and mass incarceration, criminal justice policy, state politics, the politics of race, and public policy.

Gunderson’s work examines the institutional factors influencing states’ decisions to adopt private prisons. Her book, Captive Market: Accountability and State Prison Privatization, published by Oxford in 2022, explores why American states adopt private prisons, challenging expected predictors and arguing that prisoners’ rights litigation led to the unintended consequence of private prison adoption due to states’ responses to prison overcrowding.

Her research has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Political Research Quarterly, Nature Human Behaviour, Perspectives on Politics, The Journal of Politics, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.

Gunderson has received several awards for her work, including the 2020 Mooney Prize for the best dissertation in state politics and policy, the 2020 Neal Tate Award for the best paper on judicial politics presented at the 2019 Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting, the 2019 Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Prize from the Public Choice Society, and the 2019 Best Graduate Student Paper from the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting.