2017-18
Please use the links on the left hand side to see information about our past visiting scholars. More information on the ABF's visiting scholar opportunities can be found here.
Photo and Bio Courtesy of University of New South Wales, Sydney
Melissa Crouch, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Crouch is a Senior Lecturer at the Law Faculty, the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research contributes to the field of Asian Legal Studies, with a focus on Comparative Constitutional Law; Law and Development; and Law and Religion. Her research has a particular focus on Southeast Asia, where she has conducted extensive socio-legal field research. She is currently Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Grant on "Constitutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes" (2018-2020).
Crouch is the author of Law and Religion in Indonesia: Conflict and the Courts in West Java (Routledge, 2014). She is the editor of three major volumes on Myanmar: Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar (2014); 'Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging' (OUP 2016), and The Business of Transition: Law, Development and Economics in Myanmar (CUP 2017). She has published in a range of peer-reviewed journals. Crouch has been invited to work with many international and local organisations in Myanmar with a focus on constitutional and administrative law reforms, and legal education. She leads the UNSW Law Southeast Asia engagement strategy, and is the Myanmar Academic Lead for the UNSW Institute for Global Development.
Crouch teaches in the areas of constitutional law, administrative law, comparative law, law and development, and Asian legal systems. She is the Deputy Director of the Comparative Constitutional Law Project; member of the Australia-Myanmar Constitutional Democracy Project and the Gilbert+Tobin Centre for Public Law; and member of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.
Photo and Bio Courtesy of University of Akron
Kristen Barnes, The University of Akron School of Law
Kristen Barnes is an Associate Professor with tenure at Akron Law. She teaches Property, Real Estate Finance, Real Estate Development Law, Land Use Planning, International Human Rights, and Public International Law. She received her B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College, J.D. from Harvard Law School, and Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. Barnes has published articles in top law review journals including Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy, Harvard Journal of Racial and Ethnic Justice, and the Chicago-Kent Law Review. Her scholarship focuses on antidiscrimination law, comparative and international equality law, education and constitutional law issues, real estate finance, pensions, and property theory. She has presented at numerous prestigious conferences such as the American Society of International Law's Midyear Meeting, Harvard Law School's Institute of Global Law and Policy Conference, Fordham Law School's International and Comparative Urban Law Conference, and Arizona State University's Sustainability Conference. Barnes has served in two AALS leadership roles, including Chair of the Section on Property Law and Chair of the Real Estate Transactions Section. She is a member of the University of California - Berkeley's Comparative Law Equality Working Group and a Constitutional Law Faculty Fellow at Akron's Constitutional Law Center. Before entering academia, Professor Barnes practiced commercial real estate law in Chicago and clerked for a federal district court judge of the Northern District in Illinois.
Photo Courtesy of Oberlin College
Jack Jin Gary Lee, Department of Sociology, Oberlin College
Lee studies the relationships between culture, law and politics through the building of colonial states in the modern British Empire. To do so, his research identifies the causes and consequences of the reconstitution of Jamaica and the Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) as Crown Colonies in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Because both colonies adopted Crown Colony government during the consolidation of reforms to colonial government and the use of English laws in the empire, they provide strategic lenses for us to understand the historical origins and enduring effects of these eventful institutional developments.
As a historical sociologist of public institutions, he is also interested in the making and implications of citizenship laws and labor migration policies across contexts. To this end, he has conducted research on the nascent politicization of the gay community in Singapore and the development of labor migration policies in industrialized East and Southeast Asian states.
Photo courtesy of University of Utah
Erika George, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah
George is a Professor of Law, and the Co-Director for the Center for Global Justice, at the University of Utah, College Of Law. Professor George earned a B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as Articles Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She also holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include globalization and the indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated nature of civil liberties and socioeconomic rights; cultural pluralism and rights universalism; gender violence and gender equality; justice and peace promotion in post-conflict societies; environmental justice; and the use of documentary film in human rights advocacy and education. Her current research explores the responsibility of transnational corporations to respect international human rights and various efforts to hold business enterprises accountable for alleged abuses.
Photo courtesy of Brown University.
Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor, American Studies, Brown University
Kevin Escudero (PhD, UC Berkeley; MSL, Yale Law School) is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Population Studies Training Center at Brown University. Professor Escudero's research and teaching interests include immigration and refugee studies; comparative racial and ethnic studies; social movements; law and society; and critical human geography. His current book manuscript, Organizing While Undocumented (under contract with NYU Press) examines undocumented Asian, Latinx, queer and formerly undocumented activists' strategic use of an intersectional movement identity. This book draws on more than five years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted with immigrant rights activists in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City.
His second project, "'Education, Not Deportation': Undocumented Student Experiences in Law, Medical and Doctoral Degree Programs," examines the experiences of undocumented students along the educational pipeline, paying particular attention to an often under-examined juncture for undocumented students. This juncture entails both the transition from college to graduate school and experiences once enrolled in graduate and professional degree programs. Employing the use of a mixed methods approach, this project draws on a national survey and in-depth interviews with students to shed light on the ways undocumented graduate and professional students have worked to transform the climate of higher education into one that is more inclusive for immigrant students with various legal statuses.
As a Public Voices Fellow at the OpEd Project Professor Escudero has published pieces in Latino USA, The Hechinger Report and Truthout applying his academic research to pressing issues facing immigrant community members today. From 2016-2017, he served as Special Advisor to the Provost for Undocumented and DACA Students offering campus-wide workshops and trainings regarding approaches to supporting undocumented students. His research has been supported by the American Sociological Association, AcccessLex Institute, the National Science Foundation, the UC-MEXUS Institute and the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society.
Matthew Shaw, Peabody College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University
Photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University
Matthew Shaw joined the faculty of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College in fall 2016 after completed his doctorate in education at Harvard University. Professor Shaw earned his law degree in Columbia in 2005, after which he served for two years as a clerk for Chief Judge W. Louis Sands of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. He practiced law in Atlanta at King & Spading and Schulten Ward & Turner before pursuing his Ed.D. at Harvard, where his dissertation, Shaping the DREAM: Law as Policy Defining Undocumented Students’ College Access, addressed several of his research interests, including federal law and education policy and the insularity of minority status.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Department of Political Science at Northwestern University
Photo and bio courtesy of Northwestern University
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd teaches and writes on religion and politics, the politics of human rights and the right to religious freedom, the legal governance of religious diversity, US foreign relations, and the international politics of the Middle East. Her work pursues an integrative approach to the study of politics and religion that offers insight into dilemmas of national and international governance involving difference, governance, power, law, and pluralism. Hurd is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008) and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (2015), both published by Princeton, and co-editor of Politics of Religious Freedom and Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. She is co-PI, with Winnifred Sullivan, on a Luce-supported collaborative research project “Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad” (2016-2019) and co-organized the “Politics of Religious Freedom” project (2011-2014). At Northwestern, Hurd directs the Buffett Faculty Research Group on Global Politics & Religion, co-directs a graduate certificate program in Religion & Global Politics, is a core faculty member of the MENA Program, and teaches courses on America and the world, religion and international relations, the Middle East in global politics, and religion and law in cross-cultural perspective. Hurd is a regular contributor to public discussions on US foreign policy and the politics of religious diversity, and has written for Boston Review, Public Culture, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera America, Globe and Mail, and The Monkey Cage. In 2015-16 Hurd is a Faculty Fellow at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and is serving on Northwestern’s Global Strategy Task Force, charged with defining a global engagement strategy for Northwestern in the coming decade. Hurd has a courtesy appointment in Religious Studies at NU.
Kimberly Kay Hoang, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Photo and bio courtesy of University of Chicago
Kimberly Kay Hoang’s research interests center on sociology of gender, globalization, economic sociology, and qualitative methods. A central focus of her work is to understand the gendered dynamics of deal brokering in Southeast Asia’s emerging markets.She is the author of, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (2015) published by the University of California Press. This monograph examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam's informal economy. Dealing in Desire is the winner of six distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Katherine Turk, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Photo and bio courtesy of UNC
Katherine Turk specializes in the histories of women, gender and sexuality; law, labor and social movements; and the twentieth century United States. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines how sex equality law has remade the world of work, eroding some inequalities and affirming others. Her current projects include a history of the National Organization for Women, an article on men and masculinity in feminist movements, and, with Leandra Zarnow, a study of the origins and intellectual trajectory of the field of women’s history.
Photo and bio courtesy of Northwestern University
Justin Simard, Jack Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University
Justin Simard is the Jack Miller Center Post-Doctoral Teaching and Research Scholar. He received his J.D. and Ph.D. in History from The University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Center for Legal Studies he was a Fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo. He is a historian of the legal profession, and his research traces how the routine work of American lawyers shaped the development of capitalism in the nineteenth century.
Photo courtesy of St. Edmund's College
Sandra Brunnegger, Fellow in Law and Anthropology at St. Edmund's College
Sandra Brunnegger is a legal anthropologist. Her research interests span human rights, indigenous legal systems and practices, everyday conceptions of justice, transitional justice, violence, environmental issues and social movements. Ethnographically, her research focuses on Latin America, with particular emphasis on Colombia. Her teaching interests include development, political and legal anthropology and international law.
Photo and bio courtesy of NYU Abu Dhabi
Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen is a socio-legal scholar whose research interrogates the intersections between globalization and institutional stratification across a range of contexts. In addition to her position at NYUAD, she is an affiliated research fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. Dr. Ballakrishnen is a graduate of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (India) and Harvard Law School. She is qualified to practice law in the State of New York as well as Maharashtra & Goa, India. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2015.
Nate Ela
Ela is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies the interaction between legal, economic, and environmental change in urban settings. Ela’s dissertation examines the periodic emergence and disappearance of urban agriculture as a form of redistributive social policy in Chicago since the 1890s. A past project explained how human rights litigation in U.S. courts created dilemmas for social movement activists in the Philippines. His writing has appeared in Law & Social Inquiry, the Fordham Urban Law Journal, and Social Policy. Ela holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Stephanie Didwania
Stephanie Holmes Didwania's research is in empirical law and economics, and focuses on the criminal justice system. She is particularly interested in studying how pretrial events and actors influence criminal case outcomes. Her current work examines prosecutorial behavior and bias. Didwania received her Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Strategy from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2016, and her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 2009. From 2010 to 2011, Didwania worked as a law clerk for Judge Richard A. Paez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Boyce Robert Owens, Civic Consulting Alliance
Owens completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2017, writing a dissertation on refugee admission law in federal courts. The focus of his academic work is how law works as a knowledge system, especially judge-made law in the powerful U.S. federal courts. He is currently a senior associate at the Civic Consulting Alliance working with the Chicago Police Department on their plan for reform. In graduate school , Robert was an associate editor of the American Journal of Sociology and taught seminars in “Sociology of Law” and “Self, Culture, and Society.” His scholarly work has appeared in American Sociologist, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciencesand Law & Social Inquiry. Robert Owens can be reached at rowens@abfn.org.
Photo and bio courtesy of the University of California, Irvine.
David John Frank, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine
Frank is Professor of Sociology and Courtesy Professor of Education and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He studies changes in the cultural infrastructure of world society, with special focus on global environmental protection, the university and the knowledge society, and the criminal regulation of sex. He holds degrees in sociology from Stanford and the University of Chicago. Before coming to Irvine in 2002, he was on the faculty at Harvard University.
Photo and bio courtesy of the University of Connecticut.
David Embrick, Sociology Department and African Studies Institute, University of Connecticut
Embrick is an associate professor in the Sociology Department and African Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. He spent a decade at Loyola University Chicago in the Sociology Department. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2006. He is a former American Sociological Association Minority Fellow, Past-President of the Southwestern Sociological Association, and current Vice President-Elect of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In addition, Dr. Embrick serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Humanity & Society (the official journal of the Association for Humanist Society), Founding Co-Editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the newest ASA sponsored journal of the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and Associate Editor of Social Problems. Dr. Embrick’s research has centered largely on the impact of contemporary forms of racism on people of color. While most of his research is one what he has labeled “diversity ideology” and inequalities in the business world, he has published on race and education, the impact of schools-welfare-and prisons on people of color, and issues of sex discrimination. Dr. Embrick has published in a number of journals including American Behavioral Scientist, Critical Sociology, Race and Society, Sex Roles, Sociological Forum, and Symbolic Interaction, among others. He has been invited to give talks on his work in over 60 venues, both academic and public.
Leslie Abramson
Leslie Abramson is a film scholar who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She has taught law and cinema at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Abramson is the author of Hitchcock & the Anxiety of Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her essays have been published in Hitchcock and Adaptation (2014), American Cinema of the 1960s (2008), In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity (2011), New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s (2012), and various journals. She has presented papers on law and cinema at the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Conference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conferences, and elsewhere. Abramson is currently researching representations of the law in silent American cinema. Her study investigates how silent films originated and disseminated defining moving images of American law with regard to judicial processes and proceedings, legal documents, non-uniformed practitioners of the law—specifically, judges and lawyers—and the association among the citizenry, the courtroom, and critical legal issues. Leslie Abramson can be reached at labramson@abfn.org.
Photo and bio courtesy of Indiana University Bloomington
Winnifred Sullivan, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
Winnifred Sullivan is interested in religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon that both generates law and is regulated by law. Her particular research interest is in understanding the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law. She has training in law and in religious studies and has taught both in law school and in religion departments. Sullivan practiced law after graduating from law school before returning to graduate school to study religion. Her training in the academic study of religion is in two fields, American religious history and the comparative study of religion. She focuses on the intersection of religion and law in the U.S. within a broader comparative field, both theoretically and cross-culturally. Within legal studies, her work falls broadly within socio-legal and critical legal studies.
Photo and bio courtesy of Northwestern University
Karen Alter, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
Karen Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, a permanent visiting professor at the iCourts Center for Excellence, University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law, and the co-director Research Group on Global Capitalism and Law at the Buffett Institute at Northwestern University. Alter’s current research investigates the legalization and judicialization of international relations in Europe, Africa, Latin America and with respect to economic, human rights and mass atrocities. Alter is author of the award-winning book The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights(Princeton University Press, 2014), and also International Legal Transplants: Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2017, with Laurence Helfer),The European Court’s Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009) andEstablishing the Supremacy of European Law(Oxford University press, 2001), and more than forty-five articles and book chapters on the politics of international law, comparative international courts, and international regime complexity. She is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on International Adjudication (Oxford University Press, 2014) and International Court Authority (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Photo and bio courtesy of UIC
Patrisia Macias-Rojas, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
Patrisia Macias-Rojas recently joined the Global Urban Immigration Cluster Initiative at UIC. Her research interests are in race, law, and migration. Her current project, which draws on ethnographic and historical methods, contributes to the interdisciplinary field of law and society, particularly scholarship concerned with the intersections of criminal justice and immigration enforcement. She is the author of From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America (New York University Press, 2016). Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Andrew Mellon Program in Latin American Sociology, and the Social Science Research Council.
Photo and bio courtesy of North Central College
Alyx Mark, Department of Political Science, North Central College
Alyx Mark is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at North Central College. Professor Mark’s work focuses on the American civil legal system, the ways in which individuals interact with legal institutions, and the relationship between the federal courts and Congress. Her current research, which examines the civic and political effects of interacting with legal services offices, has received the support of the National Science Foundation and the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Her work appears in, or is forthcoming at, Denver University Law Review, Hastings Law Review, Law and Society Review, and the Journal of Law and Courts. She has previously worked at the Brookings Institution as a Research Consultant in Governance Studies. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and her B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Studies at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville.
Robert Vargas, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Robert Vargas is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology, and founding Director of the Crime, Law, and Politics Lab at the University of Chicago. His research examines how redistricting laws, bureaucracies, and public policies shape the conditions of cities, with a particular focus on violence and health care. His award winning book "Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio" shows the relationship between ward boundary redistricting and block-level violence in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. With funding from an NSF Early Career award, Professor Vargas will continue his research on the political economy of urban violence through a quantitative historical project on Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco. A Chicago native, Professor Vargas also consults on numerous local policy initiatives for foundations and nonprofit organizations.