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.