Alex Melody Burnett

Alex Melody Burnett (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in the joint History and Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a feminist and urban historian who studies gender, race, sexuality, medicine, and the carceral state in the twentieth century United States. Her dissertation, The Clinic and the Cop: Policing, Health, and The Making of Trans Politics in Liberal San Francisco, offers an urban history of trans political activism and community formation during the age of mass incarceration. This project has received financial support from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the GLBT Historical Society, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School, and the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan Law School. During the 2025-2026 academic year, she held a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.

Alex’s scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of The History of Sexuality, and her popular writing has appeared in The Metropole and The F-Word: Contemporary UK Feminism. In addition to her scholarship, Alex serves as a board member of the LGBTQ+ History Association and a graduate researcher with the Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative, where she has contributed to digital history projects about women’s prisons in Southeastern Michigan and the 2016 Kinross Uprising. Previously, she served as a steward with GEO, the University of Michigan’s graduate labor union, and as an LGBTQ Intern with HathiTrust.