Michael Yarbrough is an interdisciplinary social scientist working at the intersection of law, culture, and family. His current book manuscript explores these themes through comparative ethnographic research among two groups recently incorporated into South African marriage law: people living in communities governed by indigenous or “customary” law; and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. As the world’s only jurisdiction to have recently extended its marriage laws to multiple social groups, South Africa makes possible a novel comparison Yarbrough uses to re-theorize the production of marital status as a key category in social life. His article on how these legal expansions came to be was recently published in Social Politics, and he has published other work in the South African Review of Sociology, Qualitative Sociology Review and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. In its dissertation form, his current project was awarded a Fulbright-Hays fellowship and the Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize from the Yale Sociology Department. He is an Assistant Professor in the Law & Society major at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and he serves as a Research Associate of the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg and a Board Member of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.