Melynda J. Price

Assistant Professor of Law
College of Law, Room 259
Office: (859) 257-5022
Fax: (859) 323-1061
melynda.price@uky.edu

Melynda Price joined the UK College of Law as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2006. Professor Price completed a doctorate degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2006. 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 teaches in the areas of torts, immigration, law and social science and law and popular culture. Her research focuses on race 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. Her most recent articles, Litigating Salvation: Race, Religion, and Innocence in the Cases of Karla Faye Tucker and Gary Graham and Balancing Lives: Individual Accountability and the Death Penalty as Punishment for Genocide (Lessons from Rwanda) were published in the University of Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice and the Emory International Law Journal respectively.

Professor Price is on leave for the 2008-2009 academic year after receiving the Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her host institution is the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law where she is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty Among African Americans.