About
Melynda Price is the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also a co-Principal Investigator with Zachary Bary of the Monument Workshop at the University of Kentucky, which is a Mellon-funded project that conducts interdisciplinary research and legal advocacy on issues related to monuments and memorial sites.
She was previously the inaugural J. David Rosenberg Professor of Law and the John and Joan Gaines Professor of Humanities at the University of Kentucky and the Director of the UK Gaines Center for the Humanities. In 2017, she was named University Research Professor, which is awarded by the University of Kentucky to faculty for outstanding research achievements. From 2012 to 2017, Professor Price was the Director of the African American and Africana Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. She was a 2016-2017 fellow in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University and Visiting Research at the Mannheim Center for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the London School of Economics in 2018
Professor Price’s research focuses on race, law, gender and citizenship, the politics of punishment and the role of law and politics in the monument and memorial landscape of the U.S. and globally. Professor Price is the author of At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her work has been published in both peer-reviewed social science and law journals, newspapers and literary journals. In addition to her published research, she has served as a panel reviewer for multiple national research foundations.
Professor Price completed her doctorate degree in Political Science at the University of Michigan. In addition to PhD, she also earned a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. She completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at Prairie View A&M University.
