PhD Candidate, History and Women's and Gender Studies
She/Her/Hers
About
Alex Melody Burnett (she/hers) is a Ph.D. 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, and capitalism in the twentieth century United States. Her dissertation, “Clocked: Punishing Gender Non-Conformity and The Rise of Trans Politics in Global San Francisco,” explores how trans and gender non-conforming individuals navigated and transformed the criminal legal system during the age of mass imprisonment. Through examining the stories of sex workers, political activists, imprisoned people, psychiatric patients, erotic performers, lawyers, and marginally housed teenagers, she uncovers a system of criminalization and surveillance that persisted long after the abolition of municipal cross-dressing laws during the 1970s. Alex’s writing has appeared in The F Word: Contemporary UK Feminism, The Metropole, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Outside of the classroom, she is a board member of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History (CLGBTH) and a graduate researcher with the Carceral State Project. Her research has been supported by UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the GLBT Historical Society, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Brown University, the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School, and the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan Law School.
