Michael Yarbrough

Michael W. Yarbrough is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where his teaching focuses on the Law & Society major. He is also a member of the doctoral faculty in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Yarbrough's research examines how law shapes the ways we understand marriage and other interpersonal relationships in our everyday lives. He is currently writing a book on South Africa, where the law recognizes a broader range of marriages than anywhere in the world but actual marriage rates have dramatically declined. The book uses historical and ethnographic lenses to explore this paradox, tracing how marriage has functioned in southern Africa as a site for constructing and contesting different forms of normativity and legal authority. This project has received multiple awards, including the Law & Society Association Article Prize. Yarbrough also co-edited the After Marriage Equality series (2018), three volumes that examine how queer families, activism, and political priorities are changing after same-sex marriage. Another collection he recently co-edited, the Research Handbook on Law, Movements, and Social Change, will be published by Edward Elgar Press in 2023.

Yarbrough places a high priority on working with undergraduates, and he has received awards from John Jay for both teaching and service to students. In 2020, his Law & Society capstone students published COVID-19 at CUNY, a web archive exploring how their families and communities experienced the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. With his Law & Society faculty colleagues, Yarbrough also helps facilitate the Legal Disruption Project, a student-led participatory action research project that examines how law disrupts the lives of students and their communities. In 2019, Yarbrough was recognized by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences as one of CUNY’s outstanding Assistant Professors. He holds a BA in sociology from the University of Chicago and a JD and a PhD in sociology from Yale. For more about Prof. Yarbrough’s work, please visit his website at michaelyarbrough.net.