Welcome to the 2026-27 Post Doc Fellows!
Post-Doc Fellows
Stuti Shah is a legal sociologist whose research examines the intersection of care and carcerality through the lenses of reproductive justice and law and political economy. Her current research focuses on the informal and gendered care work performed by women in state-run detention facilities. She is also working on a policy brief on the establishment and operation of prison nurseries in the U.S., and on developing global consensus standards for perinatal care in prisons. More broadly, Shah studies the paradoxical role of law as both a mechanism through which social injustice is produced and sustained and a resource that communities mobilize in the pursuit of reclaiming dignity. Her teaching interests include criminal law, family law, gender justice, and law and political economy.
Shah recently joined Emory Law’s Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice as a postdoctoral fellow, after receiving her master’s in law and doctorate in law from Columbia University and completing a Fulbright research fellowship. She received her bachelor’s degree in law and social sciences from NALSAR University of Law in India.
Stuti is particularly excited to join the Center, having long followed Professor Hutchinson’s interdisciplinary work on criminal law and enforcement. She also looks forward to working alongside colleagues and faculty affiliates at the Center, engaged in important scholarship on civil rights and social justice, particularly from interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives.
Kristin McFadden is a legal anthropologist focusing on the interaction between race, bureaucratic systems, and land dispossession in the American South. Broadly, her work sits at the intersection of legal anthropology, Black Studies, and property law. Her current research examines the risk of dispossession as mediated by legal and bureaucratic illegibility among heirs property owners in South Carolina. McFadden's research particularly examines dispossession as a cycle and draws on historical and ethnographic analysis to crystallize contemporary experiences with dispossession as an afterlife of enslavement. McFadden's teaching interests include property, trusts and estates, critical race theory, law and political economy, and legal anthropology.
McFadden is deeply committed to social justice in her scholarly research and as a guiding principle in her community engagement work. With roots in the South and a background in political organizing in rural communities, she is particularly drawn to grassroots social justice initiatives that bring together a wide array of perspectives. Through her work at the Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice, McFadden is excited to both participate in the rich intellectual community at Emory Law and foster new discourse around civil rights and social justice and its intersections with race, rurality, and bureaucracy.
