Kirby Sokolow is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Wesleyan University and a Master of Arts in Religious Studies from NYU. Across her academic career, Kirby’s research has explored the creative ways people practice religion and, in so doing, form new subjectivities and relationships to space, to embodiment, to memory, and to the social and political worlds they inhabit. Her doctoral dissertation examines Buddhism in American prisons. The project analyzes the dynamic relationships between hegemonic conceptions of religion, race, criminality, and American belonging in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, Kirby also resists analyzing power only as a dichotomy of domination and resistance. Instead, the dissertation follows the flow of affects, emotions, and feelings as people engage with Buddhist practice behind bars and, in the process, also in creative acts of self- and community-making.