Mariana Valverde is a Professor at University of Toronto Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal society of Canada. Her fields of study are the legal regulation of sexuality, socio-legal theory, historical sociology, and urban governance and law. She has written eight books, co-edited four anthologies and over 45 articles. In 2016 she received the Kalven prize of the Law and Society Association, for her longstanding contribution to empirical socio-legal scholarship. In addition to scholarly publishing, Mariana also writes for magazines, newspapers, and online forums, mostly on public-private infrastructure partnerships but occasionally on other topics; she has been published in The Conversation and Spacing Magazine. Professor Valverde lives in Toronto.