Daniel Alvord is a PhD candidate in Sociology and a Research Assistant for the Center for Migration Research at the University of Kansas. His research focuses broadly on the catalysts and responses to institutional, legal, and political changes in areas such as fiscal policy and immigration. He is currently conducting research examining the causes and consequences of the 2012 Kansas tax policy. He is also engaged in research on the role of the media in the passage of Arizona’s SB 1070.
Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She was President of the Law and Society Association in 2000-2001, and is a Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She received the Law and Society Association’s Harry Kalven award in 2015. She has published widely in the fields of immigration and immigration lawmaking, and more recently on prisons and legal mobilization. An early book, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (1992), documented the internal dynamics of the INS in shaping the Bracero Program, and connected structural contradictions in the political economy to the details of agency decision making. Another book, Invitation to Law & Society, provides an accessible overview of the burgeoning field of socio-legal studies. Her most recent book (with Valerie Jenness) is Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic (2015).
Sarah Deer (Muscogee [Creek] Nation) has worked to end violence against women for over twenty-five years and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2014. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of federal Indian law and victims’ rights. Professor Deer is a co-author of four textbooks on tribal law. Her latest book is The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, which has received several awards. Her work on violence against Native women has received national recognition from the American Bar Association and the Department of Justice. She is a Professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexualities department and the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Professor Deer is also the Chief Justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community Court of Appeals.
John Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Co-Director of the Center on Law & Globalization at the American Bar Foundation. He was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. He is the author of the 2012 Princeton University Press book, Who Are the Criminals? The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan and the 2015 Cambridge University Press book with Josh Kaiser and Anna Hanson, Iraq and the Crimes of Aggressive War.
Karen Heimer is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the 2018 President and Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. Her research focuses on gender and violence, race and violence, imprisonment trends, juvenile delinquency, and a new study of violence intervention strategies in schools. Her most recent research appears in Theoretical Criminology, Criminology, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and the Journal of Marriage and the Family. Her research on historical patterns of victimization was supported by the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation, and her recent research on cyberbullying is funded by the National Institute of Justice.
Daniel Herda is an assistant professor at Merrimack College. His interests are race and ethnic relations, quantitative methods, immigration, and social psychology. His articles have appeared in Social Forces, Public Opinion Quarterly, Sociological Perspectives, and Social Science Research.
Valerie Jenness is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She was president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Pacific Sociological Association. She is the author of four books, including, most recently, Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic (with Kitty Calavita, University of California Press, 2015), and many articles published in sociology, law, and criminology journals. Her work has been honored with awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Pacific Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, the Western Society of Criminology, University of California, and Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Her studies of sexual assault in prisons, the management of prisoners with mental health concerns, transgender prisoners, and the inmate appeals system in prison have informed public policy.
Hanna Katz is a PhD student in Sociology at Harvard University. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2011 and worked in social and legal services in New York City before beginning her doctoral studies. Currently in her third year, Hanna’s research focuses on issues of policing, criminal justice reform, and racial inequality. Her work is supported in part by a Harvard Presidential Scholarship.
Lauren J. Krivo is Professor of Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research interests include race-ethnicity and neighborhood crime, residential segregation, and spatial inequality in neighborhood social contexts. She is the principal investigator, with María B. Vélez and Christopher J. Lyons, for the second wave of the National Neighborhood Crime Study (funded by the National Science Foundation) and the co-founder of the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network. She is the coauthor with Ruth D. Peterson of Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide (2010). Recent articles appeared in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Social Science Research, and Social Forces.
Joseph B. Lang is Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Iowa. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an associate editor of Statistical Modelling: An International Journal. His current research includes work on categorical data methods, causal analysis, missing data, and fiducial inference. His criminological work appears in Criminology, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. His research on historical patterns of victimization was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Janet L. Lauritsen is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology and a co-editor of Criminology. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of victimization, the social and historical contexts of crime and victimization, and quantitative research methodologies. She is Chair of the National Academies’ Committee on National Statistics panel on “Modernizing the Nation’s Crime Statistics.” Her most recent publications appear in the Annual Review of Criminology, Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. Her research on victimization has been supported by the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the National Science Foundation.
Christopher J. Lyons is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. He studies violence and social control as powerful lenses into the social construction of inequality. Two principal goals of his work are: 1) to better understand how social, economic, and political contexts shape ethnoracial disparities in community violence; and 2) to query the explicit or subtle ways that race and ethnicity structure the mobilization of sociolegal control.
Bill McCarthy is a professor of sociology at the University of California Davis. He has also worked in the sociology departments at the University of Victoria and the University of Toronto. His most recent book, with Rosemary Gartner, The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime is an edited volume published with Oxford University Press.
Cecilia Menjívar is Foundation Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Migration Research at the University of Kansas. Her research on migration focuses on the legal frameworks and enforcement strategies at various levels of government that immigrants face and the effects on their lives. Her most recent books include, Immigrant Families (Polity, 2016), co-authored with Leisy Abrego and Leah Schmalzbauer, and the co-edited volumes, Constructing Immigrant “Illegality”: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses (Cambridge, 2014) with Daniel Kanstroom, and Deportation and Return in a Border-Restricted World (Springer, 2017) with Bryan Roberts and Nestor P. Rodriguez.
Ruth D. Peterson is Professor Emerita of Sociology and former Director of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University. She is also a past President of the American Society of Criminology. Her research focuses on community conditions and crime, racial and ethnic inequality in crime, and the consequences of criminal justice policies for racially and ethnically distinct communities. She is co-author with Lauren J. Krivo of Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide, which demonstrates how the racial organization of society helps to account for differences in crime across race-ethnic neighborhoods throughout the United States. Peterson is also co-editor with Lauren J. Krivo and John Hagan of The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America, which among other contributions lays out a national agenda for research on the linkages between race/ethnicity and crime/justice. Peterson is also a co-founder and co-organizer of the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network and its Crime and Justice Summer Research Institute.
Jason B. Phillips is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His scholarly interests include the social and emotional impacts of violent crime on victims and victimization research more broadly. Phillips earned a BA in Government from Harvard University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Long Island University.
Nancy Rodriguez is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include inequality (race/ethnicity, class, crime and justice) and the collateral consequences of mass incarceration. In October 2014, Dr. Rodriguez was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as the Director of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the scientific research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. Before heading the NIJ, Dr. Rodriguez was a professor in Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Associate Dean for Student Engagement in the College of Public Programs. She is the author of Immigration Enforcement, Youth and Families: Policy in the Absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform (2015, University of California Press) and Images of Color, Images of Crime (2006, Oxford University Press). Recent articles have appeared in Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Katheryn Russell-Brown joined the University of Florida, Levin College of Law faculty in 2003, where she is the Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations. She also taught in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at the University of Maryland (1992-2003). Professor Russell-Brown teaches, conducts research, and writes on issues of race and crime and the sociology of law. She has written numerous law review and journal articles, essays, and chapters. Her books include Criminal Law (Sage, 2015), The Color of Crime, 2nd edition (New York University Press, 2009), Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime and African Americans, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), and Underground Codes: Race, Crime, and Related Fires (New York University Press, 2004). Her first children’s book Little Melba and Her Big Trombone, a picture book biography (Lee & Low, 2014), was nominated for an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award.
Elizabeth Sabbath is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests include gendered violence and victimization, urban sociology, and race and ethnicity. She earned an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sampson is the author of three award-winning books and numerous journal articles on social inequality, crime, disorder, the life course, neighborhood effects, immigration, civic engagement, ecometrics, and the social structure of the city. His most recent book is Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.
William Paul Simmons is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Director of the online Human Rights Practice graduate program at the University of Arizona. His research is highly interdisciplinary, using theoretical, legal, and empirical approaches to advance human rights for marginalized populations around the globe. His books include Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other (Cambridge UP, 2011), An-archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’ Political Thought (Lexington, 2003), and the forthcoming Joyful Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press). With Carol Mueller he edited Binational Human Rights: The U.S.-Mexico Experience published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2014).
Elizabeth Salerno Valdez, MPH is a Doctor of Public Health student at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, where she studies maternal and child health. She has conducted health-related research to inform the implementation of evidence based substance use programs for vulnerable populations. She also has experience conducting community-engaged research, which has allowed her to build community partnerships to expand the reach, impact and sustainability of public health research programs for families residing in the Southwest and the U.S.-Mexico border region.
María B. Vélez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. Her general interests are to understand how stratification along racial-ethnic, political, and economic lines shapes and is shaped by the uneven patterning of crime and justice outcomes. Key themes include investigating: the influence of political conditions on crime patterns across neighborhoods; the dynamic nature of crime; and the consequences of mass incarceration and other forms of criminal justice contact for minority political behavior and the well-being of democracy in the United States.
Geoff Ward is Associate Professor in Criminology, Law & Society, Sociology, and the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. His scholarship focuses on socio-historical relationships between race, crime, and justice, with particular interests in racial violence, youth justice, and democratic social control. His book, The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012), examining the rise, fall, and lasting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice, received the Michael J. Hindelang Award of the American Society of Criminology, and Outstanding Book Prize of the History of Education Society. His current project seeks to advance understanding of historical racial violence, its legacies, and implications for redress.
William Julius Wilson is Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Education, and the British Academy. He is also a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor bestowed in the United States; and author of three award-winning books.
