Michelle Fabiani

University of New Haven, Henry c. Lee College of Criminal Justice & Forensic Sciences | mfabiani@newhaven.edu

Welcome! I am a criminologist with an interdisciplinary research agenda that combines grounding my work in theory, using novel sources of data, and sophisticated qualitative and quantitative methods. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the University of New Haven in the Department of Criminal Justice at the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences. My broad research focuses on understanding patterns of behavior in international and transnational crime with an emphasis of looking at illicit economies like cultural property crime and human smuggling. More specifically, I am interested in the development of and structural changes within illicit economies and assess how they are influenced by micro- and macro-level factors.

One line of my research looks at how illicit economies intersect with broader macro-social factors and assesses what methods are appropriate for analyzing these relationships. My dissertation uses routine activity theory as a framework for examining how contextual factors influence the beginning of the illicit antiquities supply chain – archaeological looting. It proposes a methodology that considers spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal relationships between archaeological looting attempts and sociopolitical, economic, and environmental stress in Lower Egypt from 2015 to 2017. Using this approach, I identified and established baseline data on patterns in archaeological looting relative to contextual factors and found that examining multiple dimensions is essential for understanding the interaction between micro- and macro-level factors and supply chain origins. Considering solely one dimension can present misleading findings, especially when combined with descriptive analyses. By contrast, the multidimensional approach helped get closer to understanding the “true” underlying dynamics of this complex relationship.

An integral element of my research is ensuring that the data and methods employed are as robust, reliable, and transparent as possible so that other scholars may also apply them. This reflects my interest more generally in the replicability of research, particularly in developing subfields. To this end, I recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship on the NSF-funded “Insurgent Artifacts” project, which examines how satellite archaeologist’s research standards inform the findings that are then used for counter terrorism policy-making. I am also interested in collaborations that seek to test the replicability and utility of holistic methodological approaches to criminological phenomena.

Policy Work

Examining the how illicit economies can be disrupted through existing laws and directed law enforcement action is another core area of my research, involving two lines of inquiry. (1) In collaboration with colleagues from Queen Mary University London I am comparing how well the United States’ and United Kingdom's legal systems respectively protect against the activities of the illicit antiquities market. (2) Addressing the challenge of how best to disrupt an illicit economy, my coauthor at the University at Albany and I analyze the decision-making processes of a human smuggling network to recommend a cumulative strategy for law enforcement.