Melissa Valle, Ph.D

Melissa M. Valle, Ph.D., is the Mellon Associate Professor in Global Racial Justice in both the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Her interdisciplinary and transnational work focuses on race, urban space, culture, visual representation, and the marginalization of peoples of African descent worldwide, with a particular emphasis on Latinx and Latin American communities.

Dr. Valle’s forthcoming book on Oxford University Press, Calidad: Race, Worth, and Urban Change on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, explores how race is encoded in the value of urban spaces by analyzing the criteria people use to determine what and who holds worth at various spatial scales in the context of urban and economic transformations in Cartagena, Colombia.

Before completing her Ph.D., she spent ten years working with youth in various capacities, most recently as a New York City Teaching Fellow on the Lower East Side. She has also worked in the field of public policy and community development in Harlem and Washington, DC. Dr. Valle is also an executive board member of the afrolatin@ forum.