Maya Barak, PhD

Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Studies; Director, Master of Science in Criminology and Criminal Justice
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College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters
College-Wide Programs
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4048 College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters Building | 4901 Evergreen Road | Dearborn, MI 48128
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Teaching Areas:

Arab American Studies, Criminology & Criminal Justice Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Master of Science in Criminology and Criminal Justice, Women's & Gender Studies

Research Areas:

Capital Punishment, Criminal Justice, Criminology, Gangs, Immigrants / Crimmigration, Legal Sociology, Procedural Justice, State-Corporate Crime

Biography and Education

Dr. Maya Barak is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of UM-Dearborn’s Master of Science in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She holds a PhD in Justice, Law and Criminology from American University. Her research unites the areas of law, fairness, immigration, state violence, and power, utilizing interdisciplinary approaches that span the fields of criminology and law and society. She is the author of The Slow Violence of Immigration Court: Procedural Justice on Trial (2023, NYU Press) and coauthor of Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America’s Death Penalty Lawyers (2019, NYU Press). Select scholarship appears in: Critical and Intersectional Gang Studies; Criminology & Public Policy; Handbook on State Criminality; Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime; Latino Studies; Law and Policy; Policing & Society; and, Routledge International Handbook on the Crimes of the Powerful.

Education

Ph.D. in Justice, Law and Criminology

Teaching and Research

Courses Taught

Selected Publications

Books

Gould, Jon B. and Maya Barak. 2019. Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America's Death Penalty Lawyers. New York: NYU Press.


Selected Articles

Barak, Maya. 2021. “Can You Hear Me Now? Attorney Perceptions of Interpretation, Technology, and Power in Immigration Court.” Journal on Migration and Human Security (10.1177/23315024211034740).

Barak, Maya. 2021. "A Hollow Hope? The Empty Promise of Rights in the U.S. Immigration System"/ "¿Una promesa vacía? La ilusión de “los derechos” en el sistema migratorio de los Estados Unidos." Las Cadenas Que Amamos: Una panorámica sobre el retroceso de Occidente a todos los niveles.

Barak, Maya. 2021. “Family Separation as State-Corporate Crime.” Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime Vol. 2(2), 2021, pp. 109-121 (10.1177/2631309X20982299). (2021 Outstanding Article or Book Chapter Award, Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime, American Society of Criminology)

Barak, Maya, Leon, K., and Maguire, Edward. 2020. “Conceptual and Empirical Obstacles in Defining MS-13: Law-Enforcement Perspectives.” Criminology and Public Policy (10.1111/1745-9133.12493).

Barak, Maya. 2017. “Motherhood and Immigration Policy: How Immigration Law Shapes Central Americans’ Experience of Family.” In Forced Out and Fenced In: Immigration Tales from the Field, edited by Tanya Golash-Boza. New York: Oxford University Press.