Melynda J. Price

Biography

 

Melynda Price is the Robert E. Harding, Jr. Professor of Law and the Director of the African American and Africana Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences.  
 
Professor Prise 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 journal, newspapers and literary journals.  
 
Professor Price joined the UK College of Law as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2006 after completing the doctorate degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was awarded the 2007 Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. In addition to her degree in political science, she also earned a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law in 2002. While at the University of Texas, she was a member of the Texas International Law Journal and was awarded both the University of Texas Coop Award for Public Interest Law and the Baron and Budd Scholarship for Public Interest Law. She completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at Prairie View A&M University in 1995. 
 
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 
 
Selected Publications:

At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2015) 

Performing Discretion or Discrimination: Race, Ritual, and Peremptory Challenges in Capital Jury Selection, Michigan Journal of Race and Law (Fall 2009) 
 
Balancing Lives: Individual Accountability and the Death Penalty as Punishment for Genocide (Lessons from Rwanda), Emory International Law Journal (Spring 2008)
 
Litigating Salvation: Race, Religion, and Innocence in the Cases of Karla Faye Tucker and Gary Graham, Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice (Spring 2006)