Dr. Samira K. Mehta
Samira K. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently serves as the Director of Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. Her newly released book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023) appeared on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023,” where it was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.”
Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. In the Spring of 2025, she will step into the role of series editor for the North American Religion series at NYU Press.
She is a member of the board of Feminist Studies in Religion, where she serves as the co-editor of the blog and is a Creative Editor at the journal American Religion. She has been a Research Associate and the Colorado Scholar in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and visiting associate professor of North American Religion at Harvard Divinity School and has been a Larson Fellow of the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and Emory University.