Experts

Melody Barnes

Executive Director of the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy

Fast Facts

  • Director of White House Domestic Policy Council under President Barack Obama
  • Former executive vice president of the Center for American Progress
  • Chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
  • Expertise on democracy, public policy, health policy, civil rights

Areas Of Expertise

  • Domestic Affairs
  • Health
  • Law and Justice
  • Social Issues
  • Economic Issues
  • Leadership
  • Politics
  • The Presidency

Melody Barnes is executive director of the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy and a professor of practice at the Miller Center. She is also a distinguished fellow at the UVA School of Law. A co-founder of the domestic strategy firm MB2 Solutions LLC, Barnes has spent more than 25 years crafting public policy on a wide range of domestic issues. 

During the administration of President Barack Obama, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She was also executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her experience includes an appointment as director of legislative affairs for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling in New York City. 

Barnes earned her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she graduated with honors in history, and her JD from the University of Michigan. She serves on the boards of directors of several corporate, non-profit, and philanthropic organizations.

 

Featured Publications

Community Wealth Building
Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy

Melody C. Barnes (co-editor)

Melody Barnes News Feed

NBC29
UVA panel focuses on lasting effects of COVID-19 pandemic on education
“How do we create a rich classroom in a new regime where students are saying, ‘Is it worth it?’This isn’t the way it was when I went into a classroom every day. How can you make this worth it for me?'” Melody Barnes with the UVA Democracy Initiative said.
Melody Barnes NBC29
UVA Today
Arts on the Hill: Poetry, Song and One Physician’s Surprise for His Wife
Each Sunday during this pandemic, the University of Virginia community has come together virtually to mark the close of another week with another episode of “Arts on the Hill.” University President Jim Ryan and aide Matt Weber launched the show last month to help connect far-flung Hoos and lift spirits during as the pandemic stretched on. The sixth episode, released Sunday night, opened with 2012 alumna Erin Lunsford, who started the show with a performance of “Neighbor’s Eye,” a song that she recorded in 2017. Then, Michael Idzior, UVA assistant band director, used his euphonium to play not one, but all four parts of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.” Fourth-year Caitlin Catterton performed a song from the musical “Waitress,” a cappella group the Hullabahoos performed via Zoom, and UVA alumnus Ron Suskind shared a poem, shaking things up with uncanny imitations of several U.S. presidents. Bill Antholis, director and CEO of the Miller Center for Public Affairs, and Melody Barnes, co-director of the Democracy Initiative, read a poem, “Of History and Hope” by Miller Williams, that was read at President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration.
Melody Barnes UVA Today
Melody Barnes talking with glasses in hand
A conversation with Melody Barnes
POLITICO
PRI
LBJ and the Great Society
President Lyndon B. Johnson is today remembered largely for his failure in Vietnam. But before the war sunk his presidency, LBJ compiled a record of accomplishment on the domestic front unmatched since FDR. Medicare, civil and voting rights, clean air and water, Head Start, immigration reform, public broadcasting — fifty years later, these programs are so deeply woven into the fabric of American life that it is difficult to imagine the country without them.
Melody Barnes PRI
Lady Bird Johnson
What Democrats can learn from LBJ's Great Society
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society offers a compelling case study of what the federal government can achieve and how grassroots activists can help move Washington toward a better place if animated by a clear purpose.
CNN
Lady Bird
How great was the Great Society? A view from 2020
This event celebrates the launch of a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded podcast series and national public radio documentary, in oral history form, on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. The conversation will be recorded and edited to create the final episode in the podcast. The project will be distributed by PRX, a leading player in the rapidly expanding public media world. Through the recollections of those who were there when this history was made, the series will seek to shed light on how Lyndon Johnson was able to pass a legislative program of the magnitude of the Great Society. The venture is modeled on LBJ’s War, which told the story of Johnson's ruinous entanglement in Vietnam through the same archival materials, including the LBJ Library's oral history collection and the phone calls curated and annotated in the Miller Center's Presidential Recordings Program.
Melody Barnes Miller Center Presents