Carceral Studies; Law & Society; Transformative Justice; Theory, Culture & Media; Feminist Perspectives

Undergraduate:

• General Sociology (Honors)
• Criminal Justice
• Law & Society
• Punishment & Society
• Visual Criminology
• The Appalachian Justice Research Lab

Graduate:

• Law & Society
• Alternative Visions of Justice
• Contemporary Sociological Theory
• The Appalachian Justice Research Lab

Michelle Brown (Sociology, College of Arts & Sciences) is a criminologist and sociolegal scholar with a joint PhD in Criminal Justice and American Studies. Her research and teaching areas include abolition and emergent forms of justice; carceral studies; law & society; and media, theory, and digital culture. Her work focuses on the rise of the carceral state and attendant social movements directed at ending mass incarceration, building more effective forms of community safety, and shifting media narratives on crime and punishment. Brown is the author of The Culture of Punishment(NYUP); co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series, and she is the former editor of the leading journal on crime and media: Crime Media Culture. She was named Critical Criminologist of the Year in 2016 by the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. She is a first generation student: an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation (Tahlequah, OK) and of English-Scottish descent, with deep lineages in Appalachia on both sides of her family.

Books

• Brown, Michelle. (Senior Ed.) (2018) The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, (over 150 essays, each 8-10,000 words by a leading expert in the field; print and online availability).
• Brown, Michelle and Eamonn Carrabine (eds.). (2017) The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology.  London: Routledge.
• Rafter, Nicole and Michelle Brown. 2011. Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press. (Translations in Portuguese and Korean).
• Brown, Michelle. 2009. The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. New York: New York University Press.
• Chermak, Steven, Frankie Bailey, and Michelle Brown (eds.). 2003. Media Images of September 11th. Newport, CT: Praeger Publishers (Crime, Media, and Popular Culture series).

Articles

• Brown, Michelle, Kyra Martinez, and Vivian Swayne. “The Legal Violence of Police Calls for Service: Toward New Community Safety Infrastructure.” Journal of Law & Political Economy. Forthcoming.
•  Kurti, Zhandarka and Michelle Brown. (2023, online first) “Carceral Reckoning and Twenty-First Century Abolition Movements: Generational Struggles in the Fight Against Prisons.” Punishment & Society. 25(5). https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745231171364
• Destine, Shaneda, Enkeshi El-Amin, and Michelle Brown. (2023) “Beyond Racialized Carceral Safety: Toward a Conceptualization of Black Safety” (Introduction to Special Issue). Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. 49(3).
• Destine, Shaneda, Enkeshi El-Amin, and Michelle Brown. (2023) “Notes on Black Safety/Special Commentaries from Black in Appalachia Interviews: With Ejeris Dixon, Krystal Leaphart, and Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.
• Brown, Michelle. “ICE Comes to Tennessee: Violence Work and Abolition in the South” Special Issue: Abolishing Detention: Bridging Prison and Migrant Justice.  Citizenship Studies 25(2):  238-252.
• Brown, Michelle and Eamonn Carrabine.  2019. “The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory,” Critical Criminology, 27(1), 191-205 
• Brown, Michelle and Judah Schept. 2017. “New Abolition, Criminology and a Critical Carceral Studies,” Punishment & Society, 19(4): 440-462.
• Brown, Michelle, Eamonn Carrabine, and Brett Story.  2017. “Interview: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” Crime Media Culture, 13(1): 107-113.
• Bohon, Stephanie, Meghan Conley, and Michelle Brown. 2014.“Unequal Protection under the Law: Encoding Racial Disparities in the Case of Smith v. Georgia,” American Behavioral Science, 58(14): 1910–1926.
• Brown, Michelle. 2014. “Of Prisons, Gardens, and the Way Out.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (Special issue: The Beautiful Prison), 64: 67–85.
• Brown, Michelle. 2014. “Visual Criminology and Carceral Studies.” Theoretical Criminology (Special Issue: Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment, eds. Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine), 18(2): 176-197.  Awarded 2014 Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize.
• Brown, Michelle and Nicole Rafter. 2013. “Genocide Films, Public Criminology, Collective Memory.” The British Journal of Criminology, 53: 1017-1032.
• Brown, Michelle. 2012. “Empathy and Punishment.” Punishment & Society, 14, 4: 383-401.

Book Chapters

• Brown, Michelle. (2023) “Abolition Now: The Countervisual Turn in Criminology.” In Abolish Criminology (Eds. Michael J. Coyle, Viviane Saleh-Hanna and Jason M. Williams). Routledge.
• Brown, Michelle. (2022) “Fugitive Justice and the Dead Body of Racialized US Politics.” Ghost Criminology, eds. Michael Fidler, Theo Kindynis, Travis Linnemann. New York: New York University Press.
• Brown, Michelle. (2021) “As Goes the South, So Goes the Nation: Abolition as a Regional Force in the United States.” The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolitionism, eds. Michael Coyle and David Scott. London: Routledge.
• Brown, Michelle. (2020) “The Challenge of Transformative Justice: Insurgent Knowledge and Public Criminology.” The Routledge Handbook of Public Criminologies, eds. Kathryn Henne and Rita Shah.  New York: Routledge.
• Brown, Michelle. (2019) “Transformative Justice and New Abolition in the United States.” Justice Alternatives. Eds. Pat Carlen and Leandro Ayres Franca.  London: Routledge.
• Brown, Michelle. 2018. “Visual Criminology.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture. Michelle Brown. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Brown, Michelle. 2017. “Penal Optics and the Struggle for the Right to Look: Visuality and Prison Tourism in the Carceral Era.” The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism (Eds. Jacqueline Wilson, Sarah Hodgkinson, Justin Piche, Kevin Walby), London: Palgrave MacMillan: 153-167.
• Brown, Michelle. 2017. “The Criminologist as Visual Scholar in a Global Mediascape.” The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology.  London: Routledge.
• Brown, Michelle and Eamonn Carrabine. 2017. “Introduction.” The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology.  London: Routledge.
• Ferrell, Jeff, Keith Hayward, and Michelle Brown. 2018. “Cultural Criminology.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture. Michelle Brown. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Brown, Michelle. 2015. Reprint: “Prison Otherwise: Cultural Meaning Beyond Punishment”, in The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle (New York: New York University Press, 2009): 190–212 to be reprinted in Punishment, Eds. Richard Jones and Richard Sparks, London: Routledge.
• Brown, Michelle. 2014. “‘Which Question? Which Lie?’: Reflections on Payne v. Tennessee and the ‘Quick Glimpse’ of Life.” Ed. Austin Sarat, The Punitive Imagination: Law, Justice, and Responsibility, Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 127-156.
• Brown, Michelle. 2013. “Penal Spectatorship and the Culture of Punishment.” Ed. David Scott, Why Prison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 108-124.