Samira Mehta

  Dr. Mehta's Personal Website
  @samirakmehta

Samira K. Mehta (she/her) is Director of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of 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.

Mehta is currently working on two academic book projects. The first, 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 present and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. The second, A Mixed Multitude: A History of Jews of Color in the United States, under contract with Princeton University Press, will trace that history through much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging, will be released by Beacon Press in January 2023.

As a mixed-heritage Jew of South Asian descent, Mehta is very grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation for funding Jews of Color: Histories and Futures and is proud to be its primary investigator. She is very excited to work with the rest of the working group, and with her colleagues at CU on realizing this project.

She serves on the board of eFeminist Studies in Religion, as a Creative Editor at the journal American Religion, and Co-chairs the North American Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College. Harvard University, and Emory University. In addition to speaking at colleges and universities, Mehta frequently teaches and speaks at high schools, churches, and synagogues. You can find her online at @samirakmehta (Twitter) and at www.samiramehta.com. To contact her about Jews of Color: Histories and Futures (or other professional matters), please email her at samira.mehta@colorado.edu.