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. She is a member of the American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) Diversity & Inclusion committee and an Executive Counselor in the ASC Division on Corrections and Sentencing as well as the Division of Qualitative Research. In 2025, she received George Mason University’s President’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Her research and teaching interests are broadly in the areas of social inequality, punishment/incarceration, and qualitative research methods. She is currently working on a qualitative study of formerly incarcerated people’s sense of belonging and civic identity: their beliefs and feelings about themselves in relation to their communities and nation. 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; British Journal of Criminology; Feminist Criminology; Critical Criminology; and Crime, Media, Culture.