Women and Gender Studies Lecture Series: Living After Killing

Purcell is a sociologist who specializes in the study of interpersonal violence and trauma. She is the patient-centered care program director at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Health Care System, which serves more than 40,000 patients across seven Northern California counties. She has worked to develop violence prevention and intervention programming and to improve the services offered to veterans involved in the criminal justice system. Purcell’s research interests include evaluating violence intervention/prevention programming for military veterans and analyzing the sociocultural factors that impact workplace violence prevalence in health-care settings. Her book, Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary (Routledge, 2012), examines depictions of violence in pornography to show the complex relationships among masculinity, identity and aggression in contemporary American culture.