Shirley Le Penne is a PhD candidate in Government at Cornell University working at the intersection of political theory and existential philosophy. Her research examines incarceration and life and death sentences in France, Algeria, and the United States as lived structures of time, mortality, and constraint. Rather than treating punishment as a purely legal or institutional category, she investigates its experiential dimensions: how a sentence reshapes one’s relation to the future, to death, and to the possibility of meaning. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods and phenomenological inquiry, her work explores what it means to inhabit a life organized around permanence - whether of confinement or of impending death. She approaches prisons not only as sites of state power but as existential conditions that test the limits of endurance, agency, and responsibility. At its core, her research asks how meaning persists, transforms, or fractures when freedom is radically curtailed.

‍