BIOGRAPHY
Janani Umamaheswar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University, where she co-directs the Social Justice Collaborative—an intellectual community devoted to normative and empirical explorations of social justice and equity issues that are often relegated to the periphery of criminological thinking. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Pennsylvania State University.
Her research and teaching interests are broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment/incarceration, the life course, and qualitative research methods. She has studied (for example) constructions of adulthood in a women's prison, the role of masculinity in the incarceration-homelessness nexus, and the prison experiences of wrongfully convicted men. Her current (main) research project is an ethnographic study of how family members of incarcerated people seek support and community to help them cope with the challenges of familial incarceration. Her work has been published in journals such as Justice Quarterly; British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology; Feminist Criminology; Critical Criminology; Crime & Delinquency; Ethnic and Racial Studies; and Punishment & Society.