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Law and Society

Center for Law, Society, and Culture

Postdoctoral Fellows for 2012-2013

Felicity Turner

Felicity Turner's research uses narratives of infanticide as recorded in newspapers, inquests, and court cases to trace changes in conceptions of gender, race, and the human body in the nineteenth-century United States. During her tenure as a Jerome Hall fellow, she will continue work on her manuscript-in-progress, "Narratives of Infanticide: Mothers, Murder, and the State in Nineteenth-Century America." Felicity's dissertation, upon which the manuscript is based, received an Honorable Mention from the Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize Committee in June 2011.

Turner received her PhD in history from Duke University in 2010. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and an Albert J. Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association. During 2010-2011, Felicity was a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. During the 2011-2012 academic year, she was the Law and Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. In June 2011, Felicity also participated in the 2011 Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History, a biennial event hosted by the Institute for Legal Studies at the UW Law School and cosponsored by the American Society for Legal History.

Sophia Wilson

Sophia Wilson studies the role judges and police play in supporting and suppressing human rights. Her analysis includes the development of a broad-based nationalism, and its effects on the formation of public conceptions of rights, which in turn, affect judicial and law enforcement behavior. Her fields of specialization include comparative public law, democratization, global human rights and gender politics.

As a Jerome Hall fellow, Wilson will revise and expand her dissertation manuscript, Human Rights, Judicial and Law Enforcement Behavior in the Post-Soviet World. The project examines why judges and police support some rights in violation of authoritarian repressive codes and yet suppress other rights despite lenient state policies. She conducted fieldwork in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Ukraine, having received grants from IREX-IARO and Chester Fritz. She was also a FLAS fellow and studied Persian language and Middle East Politics, and received a dissertation writing grant from the University of Washington graduate school.

Wilson's article "Courts, Police and Journalists: Overlooked Support for Press Freedom in Post-Soviet Authoritarian States," is forthcoming in Problems of Post-Communism. She earned her BA degree in broadcast journalism and MA in political science from Utah State University and MA and doctoral degrees in Political Science from the University of Washington. In 2010-2012 she taught Comparative Law, International Human Rights Law, Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics, Russian Foreign Policy and Women's Rights courses at the University of Washington.