Rate My Professor David Kirk

David Kirk is Professor and Department Chair of Criminology in the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as a Research Associate of the Population Studies Center at the university. Kirk earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2006. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he held faculty appointments at the University of Oxford, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Maryland. His research agenda revolves around three interrelated themes: the causes and consequences of cynicism and distrust of the police and the law, solutions to criminal recidivism, and the causes and consequences of gun violence. Kirk's interests include life course criminology, urban studies, and quantitative methods. He is actively involved in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal multicohort study that began in the mid-1990s and continued data collection through 2021. This project integrates the study of individual trajectories with social contexts such as neighborhoods, families, schools, peers, and the criminal justice system, with a contemporary focus on the correlates and consequences of gun violence over the life course during a period of significant social change in the United States.

Kirk serves as associate editor of the journal Criminology. His book, Home Free: Prisoner Reentry and Residential Change after Hurricane Katrina (Oxford University Press, 2020), employs Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment to investigate prisoner reentry, residential mobility across cities and counties, and their implications for rearrest and reincarceration rates. Key publications include 'Cultural mechanisms and the persistence of neighborhood violence' with Andrew V. Papachristos (American Journal of Sociology, 2011), 'Police violence and citizen crime reporting in the black community' with Matthew Desmond and Andrew V. Papachristos (American Sociological Review, 2016), 'Juvenile arrest and collateral educational damage in the transition to adulthood' with Robert J. Sampson (Sociology of Education, 2013), 'Legal cynicism, collectivity efficacy, and the ecology of arrest' with Brent Matsuda (Criminology, 2011), 'Collateral consequences of punishment: A critical review and path forward' with Sara Wakefield (Annual Review of Criminology, 2018), and 'A natural experiment on residential change and recidivism: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina' (American Sociological Review, 2009). These works have advanced understanding in urban sociology, criminology, and quantitative methodology.