Daria Reaven is an interdisciplinary scholar of the carceral state and legal history. Informed by seven years of work as a criminal defense investigator on death penalty appellate cases, her research combines ethnographic and archival methods to trace Virginia’s history of legal mercy. From slavery-era legal reforms engineered in the state, to modern techniques of adjudication in Richmond’s criminal courtrooms, the study examines how routine practices of clemency and absolution consolidate racialized forms of state power. Daria completed her PhD in American Studies at New York University and her Masters at SOAS. Her scholarship and teaching at Barnard will contribute to work on legal thought, culture, and the history of punishment in the American south.