Melissa Burch

I am an anthropologist whose research and community work focuses on the labor market experiences of people with criminal convictions in the United States. I focus on how prior conviction is used to limit employment opportunities, as well as how people with criminal records navigate and challenge stigma and discrimination. My first book The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America explores how a convergence of policy, law, and profit drives criminal background checks in hiring.

I direct the Afterlives of Conviction Project, which seeks pivot points between academic and on-the-ground work, and makes scholarlship available in engaging and useful ways. 

Research Areas of Interest:

criminalization, work and labor, prison reentry, risk and governance, stigma, urban ethnography, United States

Awards:

• 2022 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• 2020 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
• 2017 Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Engaged Anthropology Grant.
• 2016  Ford Foundation. Honorable Mention Dissertation Writing Fellowship Competition.
• 2014 Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Dissertation Research Grant.
• 2013 University of Texas, Austin. Graduate Thematic Fellowship. 

Selected Publications:

B     "Beyond Balance: How to Let Go of Risk Assumptions and Build Truly Safe and Vibrant Workplaces.” KJS Coaching & Consulting. Career Mixed Tape Newsletter, February 13, 2026. https://kjs.consulting/blog/beyond-balance-how-to-let-go-of-risk-assumptions-and-build-truly-safe-and-vibrant-workplaces.

       The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, Capital, and Hiring in America. Princeton University Press, 2025. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691272108/the-criminal-record-complex

“Fit to Protect: Race, Vulnerability, and the Risk Politics of California Firefighting.” Current Anthropology 65, no. 4 (August 2024): 724–47. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730999.

“To Refuse the Mark: Racial Criminalization and Twenty Years of Struggle to Ban the Box.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order 49, Nos.1/2: 177–90. http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/product/vol-49-1-2/.

“Scripting the Conviction: Power and Resistance in the Management of Criminal Stigma.” American Anthropologist 123, no. 3 (2021): 645–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13613.

Burch, Melissa. “Captive Afterlives in the Age of Mass Conviction.” History and Anthropology, July 10, 2019, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1638778.

Burch, Melissa. “(Re)Entry from the Bottom Up: Case Study of a Critical Approach to Assisting Women Coming Home from Prison.” Critical Criminology, October 15, 2016, 357–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-016-9346-3.