Doctoral Candidate in History and Women and Gender Studies
She/her/hers
About
Alex Melody Burnett (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in the joint History and Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a feminist and urban historian who studies gender, race, sexuality, medicine, and the carceral state in the twentieth century United States. Her dissertation, The Clinic and The Cop: Punishing Gender Non-Conformity and The Rise of Trans Politics in Liberal San Francisco, explores how a predominantly working-class group of gender non-conforming individuals collectively transformed California’s criminal legal system from the War on Poverty to the 1990s tech boom. Through examining the stories of sexual laborers, political activists, imprisoned people, psychiatric patients, erotic performers, and marginally housed teenagers, The Clinic and The Cop uncovers a racially and economically discriminatory system of sexual criminalization that persisted long after the abolition of municipal cross-dressing laws during the 1970s. This project has received financial support from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the GLBT Historical Society, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School, and the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan Law School. During the 2025-2026 academic year, she will hold a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.
Alex’s scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of The History of Sexuality, and her popular writing has appeared in The Metropole and The F-Word: Contemporary UK Feminism. In addition to her scholarship, Alex is a board member of the LGBTQ+ History Association and a graduate researcher with the Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative, where she has contributed to digital history projects about women’s prisons in Southeastern Michigan and the 2016 Kinross Uprising. Previously, she served as a steward with GEO, the University of Michigan’s graduate labor union, and as an LGBTQ Intern with HathiTrust.
Alex welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students about pursuing a PhD at the University of Michigan, especially from applicants with overlapping research interests.
