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Her book chapter “Family Planning is a Christian Duty: Religion, Population Control, and the Pill in the 1960s,” was included in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20^thCentury United States, eds. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). She has also authored peer-reviewed articles in the journals Theology and Sexuality and Religion and American Culture. Mehta is currently at work on a new book which will discuss how religion in the United States has shaped discourse on contraception and sexual freedoms.

This semester, Mehta is teaching Jewish Feminisms: From Labor Marches to Women’s Marches, which examines Jewish involvement in secular feminist movements, as well as the effects of feminism on Jewish religious and communal life; asking when and how Judaism has mattered to feminism and how feminism has shaped Judaism from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. She is developing a new course for Spring 2020, Religion & Reproductive Politics in the US, which will focus primarily on how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish conversations about sexuality and reproduction have shaped access and attitudes towards reproductive health in the US over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Mehta writes:

“I am delighted to have joined the Department of Women and Gender Studies and the Program in Jewish Studies here in �鶹ӰԺ. I look forward to getting to know the WGST and JWST communities. Please introduce yourself if you see me around campus!”

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Dr. Kris De Welde, Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor at the College of Charleston, is an alumna of CU �鶹ӰԺ, receiving a bachelor’s in psychology (’98), a PhD in sociology (’03), and the Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies (’02). She is the recipient of the 2019 College of Charleston ExCEL Award for Outstanding Faculty of the Year in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, for her commitment to creating a campus environment that promotes diversity and excellence. De Welde also received the 2016-2017 Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Activism Award for her sustained commitments to social justice within and beyond the academy. She has previously held faculty positions at Florida Gulf Coast University, Flagler College, and the University of Denver.

Dr. De Welde’s research interests include the study of intersectional inequalities and feminist leadership in higher education, reproductive justice, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is the co-author of the book Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education (with Andi Stepnick, Stylus Publishing 2014), which was awarded the 2015 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.

As a student at CU �鶹ӰԺ, De Welde was awarded the 2002 Betsy Moen “Walk the Talk” Award, a campus-wide feminist award for commitment to feminist teaching, activism and scholarship. While in �鶹ӰԺ, she volunteered her time for several local agencies, including the Addiction Recovery Center, the Rape Crisis hotline, and the Teenwize and Streetwize women’s self-defense programs. De Welde’s interest in women’s self-defense is also seen in her dissertation, “Women Warriors Fight Back: Resistance and White Femininity in Self-Defense,” and numerous guest lectures she gave to multiple CU Sociology classes on violence against women, rape and self-defense.

De Welde will be a panelist at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association in San Francisco, at a session which she also helped organized: “Students at the Center of Feminist Leadership: The Praxis of Transformative Justice in Academic Settings.” She is currently working on projects regarding equity in women’s leadership roles in higher education, and an oral history of women’s reproductive choices. Despite her busy schedule, De Welde took the time to answer a few questions about her time at CU and how her work in women’s studies contributed to her career path.

How has the WGST Graduate Certificate contributed to your work?

"It might be easier to answer how the certificate, and the work I completed to earn the certificate, has not contributed to my work! The courses I took, the people I met, the additional books I read, and the faculty I worked with (and in some cases am still in contact with), have indelibly shaped my path. While I earned my PhD in Sociology, my teaching, research projects, activism, and mentoring of others are all imbued with intersectional feminist values, which I began to develop and hone while earning the certificate. I’ve held multiple jobs at several different institutions, and am now Director and full(!) Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston. I’m not ready yet to wrap up my career, but in many ways I’ve come full circle! And I continue to draw – sometimes quite literally – from what I was exposed to during my time with the WGST department while a grad student at �鶹ӰԺ."

What did you enjoy most from your time at CU?

"The luxury, which hardly seemed to be the case then, of dedicating myself full time to reading and writing and exploring ideas with peers and professors. There’s still a fair amount of that in my work now, but it is definitely not how I spend most days. I enjoyed being pushed, firmly but with support, to expand my perspectives and how I understand the world, while simultaneously cultivating my own voice as a scholar and as a feminist."

What advice do you have for students preparing for grad school?

"I wish I would have known how quickly it goes by. I would have been more mindful about the time I spent in grad school. I was a “non-traditional” graduate student, having completed my BA in my late twenties, and then jumping right into a PhD program. So, I felt that I was behind, that I needed to finish quickly, and get on with a career. I earned the PhD in five years despite conducting ethnographic field work for my dissertation. I’d like to think that I would have taken my time if I had a better sense of how arbitrary certain age-to-career-benchmarks are, which I certainly appreciate now!

I also suggest that early-stage graduate students choose their advisors wisely and replace them if you need to. First, one should have multiple advisors and mentors, not just the one formally designated “advisor.” It is critical to have a team of folx that you can go to and that each have different strengths. Second, advisors should help you be a better scholar, and should prepare you for the career you aim to craft, they should make you work hard. But, a good advisor also knows how to be a good human, knows when you need to claim your own ideas (and not just echo theirs), knows when you need to be nourished with support and care (even if they aren’t the ones providing it). Seek someone that respects you as a whole person.  I know too many people that spent years putting pieces of themselves back together because of their advisor’s destructive “mentoring.” That was not my experience, but it is far too common."

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“On top of his important accomplishment receiving tenure, we are also thrilled that Professor David has been selected by CU’s the Best Should Teach committee for the Best Should Teach Gold Award,” notes WGST chair Lorraine Bayard de Volo. “With this award, Professor David joins an elite group of dedicated scholars who demonstrate exceptional talents in teaching and academic leadership.”

This year's awardees were honored in September at a ceremony featuring keynote speaker Bettina L. Love, award-winning author and associate professor at the University of Georgia. Dr. Love's work is largely concerned with how teachers and schools working with parents and communities can build communal, civically engaged schools rooted in intersectional social justice for the goal of equitable classrooms.

David's research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality in a global context. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines, where’s he currently spending his sabbatical working on new projects. David is the author of Women of the Storm: Civic Activism after Hurricane Katrina, and the recent article “Transgender Archipelagos,” which received the Best Article Award from the Society of Queer Asian Studies. David also serves as co-director of the LGBTQ Studies Certificate Program.

Congratulations to Dr. David for this well-deserved recognition of his talents, commitment, and hard work!

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Dr. Montoya was nominated for this award by Mariana Galvez Seminario, a WGST and Sociology double major. Mariana writes in her nomination letter, "Dr. Montoya has gone above and beyond in helping me gain confidence... she has helped me see that I have what it takes to be successful." Mariana also relates that before meeting  Dr. Montoya, “I hadn’t had any experience with knowledge produced by Latinx people. Growing up, I never had a Latinx teacher, and I never read or knew of anything written by a Latinx person… Suddenly, I realized I had a place in knowledge production, too.”

Mariana is currently assisting Dr. Montoya on a research project surrounding Latina activism and mobilizations, titled Guerreras y Puentes: Legacies of Chicana Feminism and Contemporary Latina/x Activism. “I am so lucky to have someone like Dr. Montoya there—who is not only an extraordinary mentor, but also someone who looks like me,” Mariana writes. In addition to the Craig L. Brians award, Montoya has previously been recognized for her excellence in mentoring and teaching with the 2017 Best Should Teach Award, and twice receiving the Women Who Make a Difference award, in 2013 and 2016.

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K. Eliza Williamson (BA WMST & SPAN '09) successfully defended her dissertation, Birth in Crisis: Public Policy and the Humanization of Childbirth in Brazil, and received her PhD in Anthropology from Rice University. She has accepted a postdoctoral position with the Latin American Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently teaching the course Survey of Brazilian Cultures: Race, Nation, and Society. Dr. Williamson was awarded the 2019 Paper Prize winner by the Association for the Anthropology of Policy, a section of the American Anthropological Association, for her piece, "'Good Practices': Humanized Birth, and Political Subjectivity in Brazil."

Health Literacy & the Opioid Crisis

Ann Price (BA WGST & ENGL '14) is finishing up her last semester of a master's program in library science at Simmons School for Library and Information Science. This semester, she presented at the Maine Library Association conference and the New England Association conference with two other people who work in libraries in Maine. Their presentations centered on health literacy and the opioid crisis, and contained information about drug use and addiction; the opioid crisis; harm reduction; suggestions for collection development, programming, and relationships with community partners; ties to the ALA code of ethics; ways to think through and improve policy and culture in libraries; and recommended resources. They co-authored a zine titled "Health Literacy and the Opioid Crisis: a zine for Maine library workers," which contains a compilation of information and resources for dealing with drug use in communities, specifically for library workers, but increasingly relevant to everyone.

Meryleen Mena (PhD Anthropology, WGST Graduate Certificate '18) recently published the article in The Scholar and Feminist Online, a webjournal published three times a year by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, as part of their fall journal edition, Unraveling Criminalizing Webs: Building Police Free Futures. This piece was written "following the March 2018 assassination of Black Brazilian Lesbian feminist organizer and Rio de Janeiro city councilmember Marielle Franco, which has since been tied to members of the military police, in the hopes of offering broader context to both the subject matter of this issue and to Franco’s murder, and of making critical connections between patterns and drivers of police violence against Black women in the United States and internationally."

The sculpture can be seen in front of the building that Chicano activists occupied for nearly three weeks in May 1974 to protest the administration’s restructuring of programs and revoking financial aid to Mexican and migrant students. Baetz's work involved including hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members, including family members of Los Seis, all working together in a collaborative process.

A dedication was held in September, which included a viewing of the documentary Symbols of Resistance: Martyrs of the Chicano Movement in Colorado. The sculpture is currently being shown for a 6 month temporary installation, but it is hoped that it becomes a permanent part of CU's campus. Baetz notes, “literal and symbolic space must be established for minoritized students, communities, and histories on campus for an equitable future.”

Read more: /asmagazine/2019/08/19/place-los-seis

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WGST Staff Updates

Alicia Turchette, WGST's Program Assistant, celebrated 10 years of service with our department in August.

Alicia was also named the inaugural Social Sciences Employee of the Month, for her devoted and effective management of our department, and her work as an advocate for the college staff as a whole. The award included an extra day of vacation, and the presentation of "Rowdy" by David Brown, Dean of Social Sciences (Rowdy, pictured here, where it currently resides on Alicia's desk).

Dr. Lorraine Bayard de Volo has been promoted to Full Professor, based on her significant accomplishment in teaching, research, scholarship and service. She is currently enjoying a semester-long sabbatical away from  teaching and her duties as Chair of Women and Gender Studies.

Dr. Emmanuel David has been promoted to Associate Professor. Read more about his recent Best Should Teach award.

Dr. Samira Mehta traveled to Jeonju Korea to give her talk “Christian-Jewish Blended Families: A Multicultural Case Study” for the conference "Religious Conflict and Coexistence: The Korean Context and Beyond.” Read more about our newest WGST professor.

Dr. Celeste Montoya's latest co-edited book was recently published with ECPR Press, Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges: Contemporary Social Movements in Europe and North America, which contains her chapter "From Identity Politics to Intersectionality? Identity-based Organizing in the Occupy Movement," and a co-authored introduction. She also co-authored an article titled "Intersectional Linked Fate and Political Representation" published in Politics, Groups, and Identity. This semester she gave two talks at Appalachian State University (Boone, NC): "From Seneca to Shelby: Intersectionality and Voting Rights" and "Guerreras y Puentes: Intersectional Praxis in Contemporary Latina/x Activism." Montoya received the Craig L. Brians Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and Mentorship for the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association - read more about this award. 

Dr. Deepti Misri gave a talk in October titled “Imagining Crip Futures in Kashmir“ at a conference on Time, Space and Memory organized by the Institute For Religion, Culture, & Public Life at Columbia University. Her journal article was recently published in Cultural Studies, and she co-wrote the article for Al Jazeera this August. Professor Misri will be moderating and presenting at two roundtables at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in San Francisco this November. Along with members of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, she will be on a roundtable titled “Decolonizing Solidarities: The Case of Kashmir,” which has been selected for a “Presidential Session” at NWSA. She will also be on a roundtable “On the Legitimacy of Protest: Kashmir, Palestine, Black Lives Matter”.

InterFest co-facilitators Dr. Kristie Soares, Anissa Lujan (WGST minor), and Lau Malaver (WGST Graduate Certificate student).

Dr. Kristie Soares has a new article, “Incomodando: On the Role of Bothering in Rita Indiana’s Speculative Work,” forthcoming in ASAP/J special cluster on Latinx Speculative Fiction. She has been involved in recent community workshops including facilitating the Embodied Playfulness Panelist and Workshop at InterFest in Denver, co-facilitating the Deconstructing Creative Genius Roundtable at Tilt West in Denver this October, and was a part of the Worldscape: Latinx Voices panel at the Jaipur Literature Festival in �鶹ӰԺ this September.

Dr. Robert Wyrod was invited to present his talk "Gender and the Precarity of China-Led Development in Africa" at the Institute of Behavioral Science Speaker Series on Monday, October 21st, sponsored by the Program on International Development. This talk examined a rural Ugandan setting that is being transformed into a China-funded industrial park, revealing how Chinese development is intertwined with, and in several respects exacerbates, existing gender inequalities in this locale. He discussed the shifting entanglements of gender and development in the twenty-first century and how China’s developmental pragmatism is producing forms of gendered uncertainty that are distinct from Western development efforts.

  Listen Now:

Dr. Robert Wyrod was recently featured on The China in Africa Podcast. Listen now to the episode "," where he discusses the environmental and human costs of these new industries, as he witnessed in the small Ugandan village of Kapeeka.

New Faculty Publications

Affiliate Faculty News

Sociology professor Rachel Rinaldo has recently been promoted to Associate Professor. Her latest book chapter, “Democratization and Women’s Activism in Indonesia,” will be included in the upcoming book Activists in Transition: Contentious Politics in the New Indonesia, edited by Thushara Dibley and Michele Ford. 

Donna Mejia of Theatre and Dance has recently been promoted to Associate Professor. Mejia also serves as director of graduate studies in dance.

Nishant Upadhyay, an assistant professor of ethnic studies, has recently accepted an invitation to join the WGST associate faculty, and the associate faculty in LGBTQ Studies. Their research interests include critical ethnic studies, Asian American studies, queer & trans of color critiques, intersectional & transnational feminisms, anti-colonial & decolonial thinking, settler colonialism studies, South Asian studies, and anti-caste critiques.

WGST has recently added two new affiliate faculty members to our ranks:

Natalie Avalos is the chancellor's postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies, and her research includes Native American and Indigenous religions in diaspora, healing historical trauma, Indigenous feminisms, settler colonialisms, and decolonization.

A. Marie Ranjbar is an assistant professor of geography, and her interests include decolonial and postcolonial feminist theory, feminist geopolitics, critical human rights, and theories of justice.

New Pearl Street Mall Sculpture

Strength from Within by Melanie Yazzie, CU professor of Art & Art History and WGST affiliate, was installed at its temporary home at 15th Street and Pearl. The work is a self-portrait of Yazzie’s and reflects her state of mind when working to improve things through thought and prayer. As a printmaker, painter, and sculptor, Melanie Yazzie’s work draws upon her rich Diné (Navajo) cultural heritage. Her work follows the Diné dictum “walk in beauty” literally, creating beauty and harmony.

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