Dr. Melanye T. Price ’95
I am pleased to announce that Dr. Melanye Price ‘95 will be joining Prairie View A&M University’s Office of the President as Special Assistant to the President, starting September 1, 2022. In her new capacity, Price will help coordinate special projects and oversee ongoing initiatives in the President’s Office. She will also continue her other administrative and teaching responsibilities. Thus, she will remain the director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice and maintain her teaching duties in the Political Science Program.
Price returned to her alma mater in 2019 as an endowed professor of Political Science and principal investigator for the Mellon African American Studies Initiative. Under her leadership, Price successfully gained the approval for a B.A. in African American Studies that began this fall. The African American Studies Initiative has enrolled more than 4,000 students in AFAM-designated courses across the arts and science curriculum and trained more than 50 faculty in the Summer Institute in African American Studies. In 2020, Price launched the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice as the inaugural director. The Simmons Center has already established itself as an important voice in race and justice conversations in higher education because of its projects on the history of enslavement on PVAMU grounds, its innovative Activist-in-Residence program, and forward-thinking collaborations on and off campus. The Simmons Center has already raised more than $4 million in funding, with other projects soon to be announced.
Before returning to Prairie View, Price was an associate professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Price earned her doctorate in Political Science at The Ohio State University and is a nationally recognized scholar and author of two books, including “The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race.” She has also been featured as an opinion writer and commentator in popular outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC. Price earned a B.A. in Geography at PVAMU and was a member of the Benjamin Banneker Honors College.
Ruth J. Simmons, President
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