The American Bar Foundation Announces the 2021-22 Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellows
May 26, 2021, Press releases
CHICAGO, May 26, 2021- The American Bar Foundation (ABF) has awarded five outstanding scholars its 2021-22 Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellowships. The five scholars were chosen from a highly competitive application pool.
This year, the selected scholars are:
- Brandon Alston: ABF/Northwestern University (NU) Doctoral Fellow in Law and Social Science
- Isabel Anadon: ABF/National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality
- Hardeep Dhillon: ABF/NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality
- Sonya Rao: ABF/AccessLex Institute Post-Doctoral Fellow in Legal and Higher Education
- Alex Reiss-Sorokin: ABF/AccessLex Institute Doctoral Fellow in Legal and Higher Education
For more than thirty years, the ABF has offered doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships to foster the next generation of scholars and support original and important research in law, social science, and higher education. The ABF makes these fellowships possible through key partnerships with other organizations and institutions.
The ABF/NU Doctoral Fellowship in Law and Social Science supports original and innovative research on law, the legal profession, and legal institutions. The ABF/NSF Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Law and Inequality encourage significant empirical and interdisciplinary research on the study of law and inequality. The ABF/AccessLex Institute Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Legal and Higher Education assist emerging scholars who research issues of access, affordability, or value in legal and higher education. The ABF/NU and the ABF/AccessLex Fellowships along with the ABF/NSF Doctoral Fellowship last for two years, and the ABF/NSF Post-Doctoral fellowship lasts three years.
“The ABF is proud to continue to identify and mentor the next generation of scholars and their significant research in the areas of law, social science, and higher education,” said Ajay K. Mehrotra, ABF Executive Director and Research Professor. “We are grateful to our many partners who help us make these fellowships possible.”
Meet the 2021-22 ABF Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellows:
Brandon Alston is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University with graduate certificates in African American Studies and Teaching and Learning. His research examines how parallel surveillance systems operate across poor neighborhoods, prisons, and probation programs.
Isabel Anadon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She will study the intersection of punishment and migration with a focus on race and ethnicity and the sociology of law. Her research is inspired by her extensive community organizing and collaborative efforts alongside local Chicago communities and stakeholders on issues of immigrant integration, education, local and federal immigration policy, and access to health care.
Hardeep Dhillon completed her doctorate in History with a secondary in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) at Harvard University. Her dissertation focused on the global development of U.S. immigration and border controls through the lens of Asian exclusion at the turn of the twentieth century. Her larger research interests include histories of law, mobility, empire, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.
Sonya Rao is a linguistic and legal anthropologist completing her Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in June 2021. Her research explores courtrooms as workplaces and courtroom professionals as communication workers. At the ABF, she will investigate the current state of legal training around cross-linguistic communication, and clinical legal education for working with interpreters informed by empirical knowledge about language and communication.
Alex Reiss-Sorokin is a doctoral candidate in the Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research examines how technological and policy choices around legal information structure legal practice and access to justice. Her dissertation project combines historical and ethnographic methods to trace how lawyers, professors, librarians, and technologists talk about, develop, and use legal information technologies across the United States, Israel, and Russia.
About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is among the world’s leading research institutes for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.
Find Media Contact and a PDF of the Press Release here.
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