BIOGRAPHY

Janani Umamaheswar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Pennsylvania State University. At George Mason University, she co-directs the Social Justice Collaborative (an intellectual community devoted to explorations of social justice and equity issues related to the criminal legal system) and she is also an affiliate faculty member in the Women and Gender Studies program. In 2025, she received the President’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—a university-wide award that recognizes extraordinary contributions in research, teaching, and/or service that directly advance diversity and inclusion within and outside the GMU community.

Her research and teaching interests are broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment/incarceration, and qualitative research methods. In her past work, she has explored constructions of adulthood in a women's prison, the role of masculinity in the incarceration-homelessness nexus, and the community-building strategies of family members of incarcerated people. She is currently working on an ethnographic study of system-impacted people’s sense of belonging and civic identity: their beliefs and feelings about themselves in relation to their communities and nation. Her work has been published in journals such as Punishment & Society; Justice Quarterly; British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology; Feminist Criminology; Critical Criminology; Crime & Delinquency; and Crime, Media, Culture.