September 2023 – August 2024
Michelle Brown is a Professor and Associate Head of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, where she also cofounded the Appalachian Justice Research Center. She completed a combined Ph.D. in Criminal Justice and American Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Brown’s research interests include punishment and society; sensory and visual justice; movement law; and social movements focused on abolition and transformative justice.
Her articles have been featured in several influential journals, including American Quarterly, Punishment & Society, Theoretical Criminology, and The British Journal of Criminology. She has also served as editor for the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, the book series Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, and the journal Crime Media Culture. In 2016, Brown was named Critical Criminologist of the Year by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology.
During her time at the ABF, Brown will work on her book project, Streaming Justice: Movements, Media, and the Problem of Crime. In the book, she argues that the problem of crime and the crisis of the criminal legal system are inseparable from a media universe with intensified and conflicting claims for narrative control.