Photograph of Valli Rajah

Valli
Rajah

Professor

Phone number
2122378675
Room number
636.03 Haaren Hall

Areas of expertise

Most requested topics by media

  • Sexual Violence / Intimate Partner Violence

C.V.

Education

Ph.D.   Sociology, Columbia University

Bio

I am a sociologist and criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center. I hold a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University.

 

JJC Affiliations

Criminal Justice BA, Criminal Justice MA, Criminal Justice PhD

Courses Taught

Race & Ethnic Relations (undergraduate level); Introduction to Sociology (undergraduate level); Research Design & Methods in the Social Sciences (MA level); Race & Crime (MA level); Survey of Research Methods (Ph.D. level); Race and Ethnicity in American Society (Ph.D. level)

Scholarly Work

Selected Publications:

  1. Rajah, V., Umamaheswar, J. & Osborn, M. Building an Anti-Racist Criminology. New York University Press, 2026.
  2. Rajah, V. Resistance as edgework in violent intimate relationships of drug-involved women. British Journal of Criminology, 2007.
  3. Rajah, V. Enhancing the tellability of death-row exoneree narratives: Exploring the role of rhetoric. Punishment & Society, 2023.
  4. Rajah, V. & Palmer, J. & Duggan, M. The personal is political and so is discomfort: Intersectional, anti-racist praxis in feminist criminology. Race and Justice, 2022.
  5. Vásquez, L., Kim, C., & Rajah, V. Intimate partner violence in El Salvador: a relationship between femicide attempts and barriers to help-seeking. Violence Against Women, 2025.

Papers under review consider how mothers who conceived after rape reorganize their identities, how rape-related pregnancy is constructed socially and legally in the U.S., how exonerees' narrative testimonies become legible to online audiences under specific interpretive conditions, and how "emotion talk" functions as a form of narrative resistance in the innocence movement.

Research Summary

My research examines how people make meaning in the aftermath of serious harm—intimate partner violence, wrongful conviction, incarceration, rape-related pregnancy—and asks whose stories get heard, how narrative form shapes what can be said, and what it takes to speak at all under conditions of constraint. Working at the intersection of feminist criminology, narrative theory, and the sociology of violence, I bring particular attention to gender-based violence, especially the experiences of women in violent intimate relationships. Beyond this empirical work, my forthcoming book, Building an Anti-Racist Criminology (NYU Press), offers a framework for the discipline. My research has been supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Association of University Women, and in 2021 I received the Sarah Hall Award for contributions to feminist criminology.