Prairie View A&M University is pleased to announce the appointment of Melanye Price ‘95 as Endowed Professor of Political Science and principal investigator for the Mellon Foundation African American Studies Initiative.
Price’s research and teaching interests include black politics, public opinion, political rhetoric, and social movements. Her most recent book, “The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race” (NYU, 2016), examines the multiple and strategic ways that President Obama uses race to deflect negative racial attitudes and engage with a broad cross-section of voters. Her first book, “Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” (NYU, 2009), examines contemporary support for Black Nationalism. Her new project is called “Mountaintop Removal: Martin Luther King, Trump and the Racial Mountain,” which uses King’s “Mountaintop Speech” as a lens for understanding the rise of Trump and the 2016 election.
Dr. Price completed her B.A. (magna cum laude) in geography at Prairie View A&M University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science at The Ohio State University. Before coming to Prairie View, she was an associate professor of Africana studies and political science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Professor Price previously taught at Wesleyan University and was an inaugural professor for Wesleyan’s College in Prison Program at Cheshire Correctional Facility, a maximum security men’s prison. She was the 2017 Black History Month lecturer for the U.S. Embassy in Germany where she lectured at universities and community organizations in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. She has done election commentary for Philadelphia’s NBC 10 as well as The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, The Hartford Courant, Vox, Pacifica and NYC and CT Public Radio. She was also a contributor to Stanley Nelson’s documentary, Obama: Through the Fire, which aired on BET.
Professor Price joins Prairie View starting in the spring semester of 2019.