PhD Candidate, History and Women's and Gender Studies
She/Her/Hers
About
Alex Melody Burnett (she/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint History and Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a feminist historian of the twentieth century United States, who specializes in transgender history, the history of sexuality, urban history, and the history of racial capitalism. Her award-winning undergraduate thesis, “Fighting Homophobia During The War on Crime: The Rise of Pro-Gay, Pro-Police Liberalism in Los Angeles,” examined battles over policing and gentrification within 1970’s LGBTQ social movements. Alex’s writing has appeared in The F Word: Contemporary UK Feminism and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Outside of the classroom, she is a board member of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History (CLGBTH) and a graduate researcher with the Carceral State Project. She has held fellowships from the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Rackham Graduate School, and the Program in Race, Law, and History at the University of Michigan Law School.
Her dissertation, “Clocked: Punishing Gender Non-Conformity and The Rise of Trans Politics in Global San Francisco,” explores how trans and gender non-conforming communities navigated sexual policing, incarceration, and economic restructuring from World War II to the 1990s emergence of transgender identity politics.
