At present, the Department has 12 permanent tenure track faculty.
Erez, Edna (Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
Dr. Erez's research includes comparative justice; sociology of law;
victims in the justice system; victimization in the context of
transnational crime and terrorism; women in crime and justice; violence
against women; violence against immigrant women; women in terrorism.
Lisa Frohmann (Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles) Dr. Frohmann is a sociologist whose areas of specialization include the social construction of legalities, organizational processes, ethnographic methods, and race, gender, and the law. Her research and writing explore the intersection of organizational structure, decision-making practices, and the constitution of power in social control settings. She has published several articles relating to prosecutorial decision-making in sexual assault cases. Currently, she is examining these issues in the implementation of family violence and child neglect social programs on the community level.
John Hagedorn (Urban Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) Dr. Hagedorn’s research interests include drugs and violence, the impact of incarceration on inner city communities, the life course of gang members, anomie theory, and the child welfare system. After working for three years as a reform administrator in the Milwaukee County Department of Human Services, he published Forsaking Our Children (1995). This book argues for a set of neighborhood-based reforms to restructure child welfare bureaucracies so they can better support troubled families.
Mindie Lazarus-Black (Anthropology, University of Chicago) Dr. Lazarus-Black’s scholarship focuses on the history and ethnography of class, kinship, gender, and the law in the English-speaking Caribbean. She has conducted fieldwork in Antigua, Barbuda and Barbados, and has also worked on an ethnographic project investigating sexual assault cases in the United States. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers that enabled her to develop a longitudinal study of the consequences of radically altering a nation's kinship codes.
Matthew R. Lippman
(Political Science, Northwestern; Law, Harvard) Dr. Lippman’s research
centers on the causes, consequences and control of gross and persistent
violations of international human rights--genocide, torture,
disappearances,
summary and arbitrary executions and war crimes. This provides a forum
to explore the intractable issues of law, morality and individual
responsibility.
A second stream explores the philosophical responses and legal
justification
for civil disobedience. He recently has completed a series of
historical
essays on the law and morality of post-World War II war crime trials,
and also is concerned with terrorism and the humanitarian law and war.
His teaching cneters on criminal law and procedure.
Christine Martin (Loyola University, Chicago) Dr. Martin's research focuses on racial disparity in court case outcomes, impact of public policy on ex-offenders and low income communities, effectiveness of services to women prisoners, and empowerment of girls and women from poor communities as a site for social change.
Gregory M. Matoesian (Sociology, University of Missouri) Dr. Matoesian’s research interests are primarily organized around the relationship between language use in legal settings, on the one hand, and culture, society, and forms of domination on the other. He also studies language use in relation to large scale legal changes and attempts to evaluate those changes: a type of applied/policy research agenda in legal settings. His work can be labeled as a hybrid of conversation analysis, anthropological linguistics, and critical social theory.
Beth Richie (Sociology, City University of New York) Dr. Richie is engaged in several research projects designed to explore the relationship between violence against women in low income African American communities. The specific focus of one study is girls who are both violent and perpetrators of violence. Another project is looking at the factors that influence recidivism and rearrest rates for women and young people being released from a large urban jail. A third project is concerned with the public policy and social factors that lead to the rise in incarceration rates of women and conditions of confinement once they are sentenced.
Dennis P. Rosenbaum (Psychology, Loyola University, Chicago) Dr. Rosenbaum has conducted many research and evaluation studies focusing on police, community, school, and media initiatives to prevent violence, disorder, and drug abuse. His interests include community crime prevention, community policing, interagency partnerships, drug abuse prevention, and information technology applications in law enforcement. He has served as an advisor to local, state, and national organizations interested in community-based initiatives to prevent crime. He has directed longitudinal studies of community policing and school-based drug education, as well as national evaluations funded by the National Institute of Justice.
Laurie Schaffner (Sociology, University of California, Berkeley) Dr. Schaffner's work focuses on youth in trouble with the law and the sociological and political responses by the juvenile corrections systems, both legal and psychiatric. Drawing upon research using interviews, ethnography, cultural documents, and secondary national data, she examines shifts in the constitution of trouble for girls as compared with boys in the legal system, other adolescent girls, and young women a century ago. She is working on a manuscript, Worlds of Girls: In Trouble with the Law. She is also preparing a manuscript, with co-editor, Dr. Elizabeth Bernstein, Barnard-Columbia, of the anthology, Sexuality and the State: Revisioning the Politics of Intimacy. Her work has earned awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the American Society of Criminology.
Amie Schuck (University of South Florida) Dr. Schuck's research focuses on how neighborhood and community factors impact family and individual outcomes such as violence, child abuse, substance-abuse problems and mental health. Her interests specifically include how changes in neighborhood and community structure, such as capacity and empowerment, affect the developmental outcomes of residents.
Sarah E. Ullman
(Psychology, Brandeis University) Dr. Ullman's research program focuses
on understanding situational and behavioral factors related to rape
avoidance to inform rape prevention programs and the impact of rape and
other traumatic events on adult mental health and physical health. The
goal of her work is to understand how crime affects adult functioning,
so that effective treatment and intervention strategies can be
developed. Current projects include a longitudinal study of the role of
social reactions to sexual assault survivors' recovery, including PTSD
and drinking problems, an interview study of advocates and mental
health providers about service provision to survivors, and a study of
how social reactions to child sexual abuse disclosures affect college
students' mental health.
Department Head: Prof. Erez (312) 996-5262
Director:
Graduate Studies Dr. Matoesian (312) 996-7971
Undergraduate Studies Dr. Frohmann (312) 413-2477
Administrative Assistant Donna Dorney (312) 413-3030
Academic Advisor Dwayne Alexander (312) 996-9871
Graduate Secretary Sharon Casillas (312) 996-2383