Daniel Platt is a scholar of law, political economy, and political culture. Raised in the Chicago area, he earned his PhD in American Studies at Brown University in 2018 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Law before joining the faculty at UIS in 2020. His first book, The Price of Misfortune (2023), examined struggles over debtors' rights in the late nineteenth century. His current research deals with religion and the prison abolition movement in the late twentieth century.