Professor, Religion, Spirituality, and Society and Director, Freedom Education Project Puget Sound
Tanya Erzen is a Professor of Religion, Spirituality and Society and directs the Crime, Law, & Justice Studies minor. She is a founder of the (FEPPS), a higher education in prison program at the Washington Corrections Center for Women.
She is currently writing a book entitled Runaways, Delinquents and Unruly Girls: Gender and the Carceral State in Washington supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant. Professor Erzen is also the author of , (Beacon Press, 2017); (California, 2006), which received the Ruth Benedict Prize and the Gustave O Arlt award; (Beacon Press, 2012); and co-editor of (NYU, 2001).
From 2023-2026, Erzen is the PI on the Mellon Foundation Humanities for all Time grant to foster humanities approaches to the Crime, Law and Justice program. She is also leading a national project on promising teaching and learning practices in higher education in prison from the Ascendium Education Group. In addition she is collaborating with the to build a digital archive of gender and incarceration in Washington. She has been a and a . She has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Association of University Women and the Social Science Research Council.