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 related to the criminal legal system. 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 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.