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 and is an affiliate faculty member in the Women and Gender Studies program as well as a Fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies.

Her research and teaching interests are broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment and incarceration, and qualitative research methods. She has studied (for example) the role of masculinity in the incarceration-homelessness nexus, the prison experiences of wrongfully convicted men, and the support-building strategies of families of people in prison. She is a co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology (2026) and a co-author of Anti-Racist Criminology: Research, Teaching, and Public Engagement (forthcoming in 2026 with NYU Press). Her work has also been published in journals such as Punishment & Society; Justice Quarterly; Theoretical Criminology; the British Journal of Criminology; Feminist Criminology; Socius; and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. 

She is currently writing a book (Somewhere Like Home: Formerly Incarcerated Americans’ Quest for Belonging, under contract with University of California Press) based on qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated Americans about their sense of civic identity and belonging.