Pembroke Center

Ph.D. 2024, Sociology, Brown University

My scholarship sits at the intersection of gender, law and human rights, crime and punishment, and science, knowledge, and technology. Using a feminist intersectional lens and mixed methods, I study expertise, knowledge-making, and inequalities in the criminal justice system in the US and the Global South.

My current scholarship advances two interrelated streams: 1) how medical and legal institutions construct women as victims-survivors of gender-based violence, and 2) how those institutions construct the criminalization of women and men. The first stream has led to a book project, A Fraught Project of ‘Modernity’: Sexual Violence, Law, and Gender Justice in Bangladesh, based on ethnographic fieldwork funded by the National Science Foundation, the Graduate School at Brown University, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I examine how forensic infrastructures have reshaped sexual-violence adjudication in Bangladesh and the consequences for gender justice. The second stream, developed through collaborative work between the School of Law and the Department of Information Sciences at Cornell University, analyzes capital-trial transcripts in the United States to trace how gendered and racialized discourses around gender-based violence and mental health shape credibility, culpability, and assessments of “dangerousness” of men and women on death row. Both projects carry a strong public-scholarship edge, aiming to inform advocacy that challenges gender-biased prosecution and defense narratives and supports gender and trauma-sensitive legal training.