Dr. Brittany P. Battle is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department and Affiliate Faculty in the African American Studies Program at Wake Forest University. She is also a recent Ford Postdoctoral Fellow and Emerging Poverty Scholars Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty. As an ethnographer, her research interests include social and family policy, courts, carceral logics, social justice, and culture and cognition. She teaches courses on social justice in the social sciences, (re)imagining the criminal legal system and transformative justice, and courts & criminal procedure. In addition, she is a community grassroots organizer and Co-Founder of Triad Abolition Project with extensive experience working with organizations and agencies to pursue liberation. Her work has been recognized with the Eastern Sociological Society's 2022 Public Sociology Award, Sociologists for Women in Society 2021 Feminist Activism Award, and the American Society of Criminology Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice 2020 Praxis Award. 

Dr. Battle's scholarship has been funded by the Institute for Research on Poverty, Ford Foundation, American Sociological Association, and Sociologists for Women in Society. She is currently working on a book manuscript (under contract with NYU Press), They’re Stealing My Opportunity to Be a Father, which examines the impact of state intervention and carcerality in the child support system through extensive ethnographic observations and interviews. The project illuminates the ways that the child support system functions as a neoliberal construct at the intersection of the welfare and criminal justice systems.

Dr. Battle completed a PhD in Sociology at Rutgers University - New Brunswick in March 2019. She earned an MA in African American Studies from Temple University and a BA in Sociology (Law & Society concentration), Women's Studies, and Black American Studies from the University of Delaware.

Check out Dr. Battle's CV for more on her research and scholarship.