Melanie Newport

Melanie Newport is an assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She teaches at the Hartford campus. She is author of the forthcoming book, This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, coming out with University of Pennsylvania Press on November 15, 2022.

Newport hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma and Tacoma, Washington. She took her BA from Pacific Lutheran University in 2006. She completed an MA at the University of Utah in 2009 and her PhD at Temple University in 2016.

Interdisciplinary communities are central to Newport’s work. At UConn, she is affiliated faculty in Africana Studies; American Studies; the Center on Community Safety, Policing, and Inequality, UConn Law School; Sustainable Global Cities Initiative; and Urban and Community Studies. She is active in supporting the Crime & Justice Minor at UConn.

At the University of Chicago Press, Newport is a Series Editor with the Chicago Visions and Revisions series. She is excited about acquiring and developing Chicago-related trade books in criminal justice, sociology, and history, especially those that are place-based and focus on experiences of race, class, and gender.

Newport’s research has been supported by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the University of Chicago, and the Center for the Humanities at Temple. As a graduate student, Melanie worked as a preceptor in African American Studies at Princeton University and taught at Temple University, Community College of Philadelphia, and Garden State Youth Correctional Facility in New Jersey. She has trained with the Inside-Out Prison Education exchange.