Professor Evan Stark is the world’s leading authority on coercive control, a type of domestic abuse that doesn’t always involve physical violence. He is an esteemed researcher, social worker and sociologist whose groundbreaking work on coercive control has had a major impact on approaches to domestic abuse around the world.

He is Emeritus Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Professor Stark's innovative work has informed governments and domestic violence organizations and has been widely cited in the media.

Professor Stark’s award-winning 2007 book, Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life, has had an immense influence internationally and was the original source of the coercive control model when the United Kingdom’s Home Office widened the definition of domestic violence in 2015.

Throughout his long and illustrious career, Professor Stark has taught at Yale, as well as Rutgers, and held appointments at the University of Essex, Bristol University, the University of Edinburgh and Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios (ESEN) in El Salvador. His international work also extends to helping the response to abused women in Turkey, Taiwan and Serbia.