Melissa Checker
Professor & Chair
Office: Powdermaker Rm. 250A
Telephone: (718) 997 5148
Email: mchecker@qc.cuny.edu
Academic
Dr. Melissa Checker (PhD NYU, 2002) is Professor and Chair of Urban Studies at Queens College, and an affiliate faculty member in the PhD programs in Anthropology and Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Her research focuses on environmental justice activism in the U.S., environmental gentrification, the politics of urban sustainability, and more recently, contemporary movements for political and economic sovereignty, anarcho-capitalists and sovereign citizens. She is the author of The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice (2020), which won the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of North America Book Prize and Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (2005), which won the 2007 Society of Humanistic Sociology Book Award and was a finalist for the Julian Steward Award. She co-edited Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice (Cambridge 2015) and Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life (2004). In addition, she has authored a number of academic articles and book chapters, as well as articles for popular magazines and newspapers.
As of 2026, Checker serves as President-elect of the American Anthropological Association’s Critical Urban Anthropology Association, and Secretary of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. She is also a Fellow with the Society for Applied Anthropology.