Victor Lund Shammas is a sociologist whose work spans the political economy of punishment, Bourdieusian social theory, and comparative penology. He received his PhD from the University of Oslo in 2017 and has been a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. Before joining the University of Bergen, he served as Head of Department at the University of Agder in southern Norway. His research has appeared in journals such as Punishment & Society, The British Journal of Criminology, Critical Criminology, Law and Critique, and Constellations, among others. He is the author of “The Pains of Freedom” (2014), a widely cited study of Norway’s open prisons, and “Burying Mont Pèlerin” (2018), on the intellectual history of neoliberalism.

At SCAS, Shammas will work on Punishment in Transition, a comparative study of penal change in the Nordic countries and California. Drawing on more than a decade of research on the political economy of punishment, the book asks why these two global outliers – one known for moderation and rehabilitationism, the other for being a site of carceral expansionism – have inched toward each other’s penal logics, and what it would mean, after Foucault, to “punish better”.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.