B.S. in Psychology, B.A. in German, The University of Georgia, 2008

M.A. in Sociology, The University of Maryland, 2015

Ph.D. in Sociology, The University of Maryland, 2019

Melissa Brown is a scholar of Black feminist thought, digital sociology, social movements, and sexual politics. She has a forthcoming chapter titled "For a Black feminist digital sociology" in the forthcoming edited volume Black Feminist Sociology published by Routledge and for which she serves as the digital editor of the companion website. Prior to arriving at SCU, Melissa was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Previously, she has published her research on antiracist and Black feminist social media activism in the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies and Sociology Compass. She currently maintains Blackfeminisms.com as a public scholarly project that disseminates academic research and theory by and about Black women across the African Diaspora.

Melissa Brown works with research assistant Kaitlin Webster in the Communication Department. Webster enrolled in Santa Clara University in the fall of 2021, expecting to graduate in 2025 majoring in Women's and Gender Studies and Neuroscience. She is a 2022-2024 Innovation Fellow through the Ciocca Center at SCU and assists Faith Zhou in the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department. She plans to combine a biological and sociological approach in her career and attend graduate school for a Ph.D. in one of her fields of study (WGST or neuroscience) to pursue a research faculty position at a liberal arts university.