The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is pleased to welcome the 2024-25 Visiting Scholars cohort to the ABF research community. This year’s scholars are Aaron Z. Pitluck, Michelle Brown, and Hila Keren.
The ABF invites national and international scholars to take advantage of our diverse sociolegal community and research facilities through its Visiting Scholars program. The ABF chooses scholars whose research coincides with the organization’s research agenda of innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law and society. Visiting Scholars participate in the intellectual life of the ABF by attending weekly seminars with leading scholars, collaborating with ABF faculty, and participating in workshops and discussions with the ABF Fellows.
“The strength of the ABF’s intellectual community is in large part due to the high caliber of its Visiting Scholars,” said ABF Executive Director Mark Suchman. “We are privileged to host these extraordinary scholars this year, and we warmly welcome them to our community.”
Meet the 2024-25 Visiting Scholars Cohort:
- Aaron Z. Pitluck (he/him) is a Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association. Drawing on economic sociology, anthropology, and cultural analysis, his research interests center on financial actors, organizations, markets, and institutions, particularly in the Global South. While at the ABF, he is writing an interdisciplinary book describing how investment bankers, Shariah scholars, and the state are co-producing Islamic banking and finance in Malaysia. By investigating this case study, the book aims to distinguish between empowering and exploitative finance, and to build an understanding of how the trajectory of finance can be bent toward the former.
- Michelle Brown (she/her) is a Professor and an Associate Head of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, where she also cofounded the Appalachian Justice Research Center. 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.
- Hila Keren (she/her) is the Associate Dean of Research and the Paul E. Treusch Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles. With a particular interest in the relationship between law and social change, Keren’s primary areas of scholarship are contract law, feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and the emerging field of law and emotions. Her first book, Contract Law from a Feminist Perspective, was published in Hebrew by Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law in 2005. She is currently at work on a book which explores the interrelationship of contract law and emotions.
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About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.