​Melynda Price is the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan.   

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, where she also served as Director of the 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.

Professor Price’s research focuses on race, gender and citizenship, the politics of punishment and the role of law in the politics of race and ethnicity in the U.S. and at its borders. In 2008, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her host institution was the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law. She was a 2016-2017 fellow in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University.  

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 is a member of the UNITed in Racial Equity (UNITE) Research Priority Advisory Board and has served as a panel reviewer for multiple national research foundations. 

Professor Price completed a doctorate degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. She completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at Prairie View A&M University.