Assistant Professor, Anthropology
1085 S. University Ave.
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1107
phone: 734-647-9622
hours: Tuesdays, 1 pm - 3 pm or by appointment
About
I am an anthropologist whose research and community work focuses on the experiences of people with criminal convictions in the United States. I examine how social inequalities are reproduced through processes of criminalization and how people navigate and resist the stigma and discrimination associated with a criminal record. My first book The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (forthcoming with Princeton University Press) explores the convergence of policy, law, and profit driving the use of criminal background checks in hiring.
My scholarship seeks pivot points between academia and on-the-ground work. I direct the Afterlives of Conviction Project, which aims to aims to deepen understanding of the lived experience of criminal records and make scholarlship available to organizers, educators, and policymakers in engaging and useful ways.
Research Areas of Interest:
criminalization, prisoner reentry, risk and governance, stigma, work, labor markets, 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.
Publications:
“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.
