Amanda Hughett is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on law, social movements, and the criminal justice system in the United States. Before coming to UIS, she was a postdoctoral fellow at SUNY-Buffalo’s Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. From 2015 to 2017, she was a Law and Social Sciences Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, Illinois.

Hughett is currently at work on her first book, Silencing the Cell Block: The Making of Modern Prison Policy in North Carolina and the Nation, which examines how civil liberties lawyers and public officials reshaped prison policy in response to prisoners’ activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Her manuscript was selected for participation in the American Society for Legal History’s Wallace Johnson First Book Program. In 2018, her dissertation won the Law & Society Association’s Dissertation Prize, which is awarded to the dissertation in any humanities or social science field that best represents outstanding work in law and society research