Shelby, recipient of the 2018 Ivan Allen College Graduate Student Legacy Award, is working as a dual appointee in Northwestern's Department of Sociology and its Center for Legal Studies as part of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). She will teach courses at the university and continue work on the project "Designing Justice: Sexual Violence, Technology, and Citizen-Activism," which was her dissertation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The project "examines how gender violence activists and state actors negotiate issues of sexual consent and mediate the experience of sexual violence through technological activism," per her profile page at Northwestern.

Shelby also won the Homer Rice Award from the School of History and Sociology in 2018, received the Presidential Fellowship from 2015 to 2019, and received the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2019 to 2020.