Governance

About the Governing Council

The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) is governed by a Governing Council (GC) comprised of the Executive Committee (EC), Members-at-Large, and the chairs/co-chairs of the Lesbian Caucus and the Women of Color Caucus respectively. The GC serves as the NWSA board of directors and has all the authority and responsibilities usually assigned to such a body and as set forth in law, Articles of Incorporation, bylaws, and other policy documents. Because NWSA is one of the most critical intellectual anchors for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), board members should be able to demonstrate:

  • experience with transformative, collaborative, and creative leadership in NWSA and/or WGSS as a whole;
  • a breadth of knowledge about the field through publishing, teaching, and/or leadership experiences;
  • and an ability to galvanize resources in support of the Association (e.g., praxis opportunities for students).

We encourage you to explore our Association Bylaws and other pertinent materials below. 

Each member of our Governing Council (GC) serves two-year terms with our President serving an additional ex-officio year of service on the GC. NWSA recognizes the breadth and depth of how our members engage in women's, gender, and sexuality studies - therefore we welcome any interested members in serving on the GC and encourage you to nominate a colleague or run for a position during our annual Elections season. The Association is proud of over 40 Constituency Groups that coordinate space for community, collaboration, and scholarly work. Members interested in joining or leading a Constituency Group can explore more resources here.

For more information regarding governing structure please click the links below.

Bylaws

Link here

Advisory Board

Link here

Strategic Plan

Link here

Elections

Link here

The National Office

The Governing Council, and the Association as a whole, is supported and anchored by the staff in the National Office. The team oversees daily operations, conference planning, membership support and engagement, and fosters collaborative relationships with stakeholders. 

About the National Office

Governing Council Members

Jessica N. Pabón

President, 2025-2027

Dr. Jessica N. Pabón (she/her) is a diaspoRican performance studies scholar of identity, community, and resistance. A queer feminist ethnographer, her research looks to amplify the voices of folks doing feminism through arts and culture. She was Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY New Paltz until March 2025 when she resigned from her tenured position in protest. 

  

She went to her first National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference in 2002, but it was not until 2015 that she stepped into a leadership role as a co-founder (and co-chair) of the Arts & Performance Interest Group; her term ended in 2018, but she is still an active member of the constituency group. In 2022, she began organizing NWSA members to create a Puerto Rican Feminisms Interest Group that became an official constituency group as of 2025. She has served on the NWSA Governing Council as a Member-at-Large since 2023 and her term ends in 2026. 

   

As an interdisciplinary scholar, her essays appear across a diverse group of peer-reviewed academic journals including: Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Theatre History Studies, Performance Research, and TDR: the journal of performance studies. She has contributed chapters to anthologies such as The History and Aesthetics of  Hip-Hop in the United States (forthcoming, fall 2025), Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity (2019), La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades (2016), and the Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (2016). 

  

She is the author of Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018) and editor of the anthology, Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire (The Feminist Press, November 2025). 

 

She works and lives on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Munsee Lenape people, in the Hudson Valley of New York. She spends her summers as a butterfly doula, assisting monarchs survive their migration journeys and can otherwise be found baking sourdough everything, sewing, or in the forest admiring the moss with her dog. 

Contact President Pabón

Kristina Gupta

Vice President, 2025-2026

Dr. Kristina Gupta (she/they) is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of sexuality studies, feminist theory, feminist studies of science and medicine, and disability studies. She teaches courses such as “Sexual Politics in the U.S.,” “Gender and the Politics of Health,” and “Men, Masculinity, and Power.” She is currently working on a book project about asexuality, compulsory sexuality, and science. Her first book, Medical Entanglements: Rethinking Feminist Debates about Healthcare (Rutgers University Press, 2019), uses intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theory to move beyond “for or against” approaches to medical intervention. She is also a co-editor of Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (The University of Washington Press, 2017), and her articles have been published in Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Medical Humanities, the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Feminism & Psychology, among others. She has a PhD from Emory University in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, an MA from Rutgers University in Women’s and Gender Studies, and a BA from Georgetown University in Women’s Studies and History.

At Wake Forest, she is co-director of the WFU DIsability Studies Initiative and killsjoy as the coordinator of an activist group of faculty, staff, and students called Wake Forward. She is a loving and well-intentioned parent of a nine-year-old. Dr. Gupta is a longtime committed member of NWSA, including serving as co-chair of the NWSA Asexuality Studies Interest Group and organizing Asexuality Studies Interest Group sponsored panels as well as other asexuality-studies related panels. She has served every year as an NWSA graduate student mentor since 2015.

Contact Vice President Gupta

Hiram Ramirez

Treasurer, 2024-2026

Dr. Hiram Ramirez (he/him/el) serves as the Assistant Vice President for Inclusion and Innovation in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

Before joining the College, Dr. Ramirez served as the Assistant Vice President for Inclusive Excellence and Strategic Initiatives at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. During his time at Miami University, he co-chaired the Reimagining the Academy Conference, coordinated the Campus Climate Survey, initiated and led a robust training program including faculty search committees and student diversity workshops. 

Prior to Miami University, he was the Director of Inclusive Student Services and the Multicultural Dream Center at California State University Channel Islands. There he led a Black/African American identity-based summer program for high schools students, developed the SafeZone (LGBTQ+ awareness) and Undocumented Student Ally trainings and helped to grow the Promoting Achievement Through Hope (PATH), a program supporting foster youth, adopted, in guardianship or kinship care and/or students who have experienced being unhoused. His first full-time job in higher education was at a gender-diverse women’s college, where he served as a Graduate Intern in Title IX Compliance, the Director of Campus Life and Student Engagement and the Assistant Director of Campus Life and Intercultural Engagement at Agnes Scott College. 

He has taught numerous courses connected to his research which is anchored in American higher education. His academic study focuses on Latino men's relationship with machismo and its influence on their collegiate journey, men of color in higher education, masculinity, academic success, queer theory, LatCrit theory and other related topics. He currently serves as the Treasurer for the National Women’s Studies Association. 

Dr. Ramirez completed an Associate’s degree at Valencia Community College, a B.A. and M.Ed. at the University of South Florida and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at Loyola University Chicago. When he is not championing DEI, he can be found wrangling one of his four fur babies with his husband or enjoying a good fantasy book.

Umme Al-wazedi

Secretary, 2024-2026

Dr. Umme Al-wazedi (she/her) is Professor of English and Division Dean of Humanities at Augstana College. She received her B.A. from Rajshahi University in Bangladesh and holds M.A. degrees in English from both Rajshahi University and Eastern Illinois University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Purdue University with a Women's Studies Graduate Minor Certificate. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial literatures (Asian, African, Caribbean, Polynesian, and Irish), British and Black British literature, Asian-American literature, feminism ("Third World," Black British, and American), trauma theory, women and the "Third World," "Third World" films and cultural studies, and translation theory.

Contact Secretary Al-wazedi

Melinda Chen

Member-at-Large, 2025-2027

Dr. Melinda Chen (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Chen is a transdisciplinary advocate-scholar who brings a feminist and intersectional harm reduction and empowerment model to her research and in the classroom. 

Dr. Chen’s scholarship examines sexual violence, queer of color critique, public policy and health, welfare reform, and feminist and queer/ing methodologies. Her first book, Killing Radicalism: Anti-Rape Advocacy Reimagined (NYU Press, 2026), interviewed 63 rape victim advocates about their lived experiences working in the field and makes the argument that, when advocacy is bound to neoliberal state funding conditions, advocacy has disparate, re-victimizing effects on marginalized survivors (e.g., BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, etc.). These re-victimization practices are subliminal to the advocates’ eyes but will lead to the downfall of radical resistance, unless concrete action is taken now to reimagine the purpose and futures of victim advocacy. Dr. Chen’s second book, The Native Justice Project, is coauthored with Sarah Deer, JD (Muscogee Creek) and under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. This book listens to the stories of 51 Indigenous women and Two-Spirit survivors of rape and hate crimes to conceptualize justice outside the binary between carceral and restorative, cultivating sovereign Native justice. 

Dr. Chen teaches in the areas of feminist and queer/ing methodologies and theories, violence and crime, social justice, and 2SLGBTQIA+ studies. She also has experience teaching in the field of transnational and globalization studies, and teaching for general public audiences. Students in Dr. Chen’s classroom develop critical thinking around issues pertaining to intimate violence, empowerment, and identities. We learn to take our theoretical discussions and turn them into real-world, applied social action.

Contact the Members-at-Large

Laurie Essig

Member-at-Large, 2025-2026

Dr. Laurie Essig (she/her) is Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. She is a sociologist who teaches courses on how power shapes our bodies and our desires Her courses include Sociology of Heterosexuality, White People, and Making Feminist Media. Her first book, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (Duke, 1999) considered how sexual others are imagined and thus imagine themselves in Russia. Her second book, American Plastic: Credit Cards, Boob Jobs and Our Quest for Perfection (Beacon, 2010) argued that cosmetic surgery in the US is the subprime mortgage crisis of the body, with corporations squeezing profit from working class Americans who hope a more perfect body will lead to a better future. Her most recent book, Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter (UC Press, 2019), argues that romance as an ideology became even more powerful in the last few decades even as actual marriage rates declined. Romance promises us a safe and secure future as a private love affair even as our future is more and more precarious. Rather than demanding the necessary political and structural changes today for a secure tomorrow, we are too busy reading romance novels, obsessing over royal weddings, or swiping through our dating apps to pay much attention to the world around us. Essig has written for a variety of publications including the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Conversation and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is working with feminist collaborators all over the world on a new podcast “Feminism, Fascism & the Future.” “Feminism, Fascism, & the Future” explores the global rise in anti-gender ideology movements and what we can do as feminist academics, activists, and artists to fight back. Listen to it on Spotify or here.

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Victoria Reyes

Member-at-Large, 2025-2027

Dr. Victoria Reyes (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. She previously taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Growth and Structure of Cities Department.

Dr. Reyes studies how culture shapes global inequality, with a particular focus on borders, empires, and meaning-making. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she has examined globalized travel, World Heritage sites, ships, and legally plural, foreign-controlled places she calls “global borderlands.” Dr. Reyes has also written about transparency and positionality in field work.

Her first book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines, is forthcoming (September 2019) from Stanford University Press. Her work has also been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Poetics, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology, among other outlets. Dr. Reyes has written for The Conversation, the Monkey Cage at The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed and received fellowships from the Institute of International Education (2006-2007 Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines), the National Science Foundation (2009-2012 Graduate Research Fellowship), and the American Sociological Association (2014 cohort, Minority Fellowship Program).

She received her PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Sociology in January 2015, and was a 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.

Contact the Members-at-Large

Maria Rovito

Member-at-Large, 2025-2026

Dr. Maria Rovito (she/her) is a disability justice scholar, medical humanities professor, and openly disabled faculty member at a STEM-focused health sciences college. Her interdisciplinary research explores the rhetoric of chronic gynecological pain, the history of medical misogyny and racism, and the cultural silencing of disabled bodies. A member of the NWSA Access and Inclusion Committee and the chair of the Reproductive Justice Interest Group, Maria has become a powerful advocate for disability access in academia, especially within institutions historically hostile to accommodations. She teaches courses on medical humanities, feminist disability theory, and reproductive justice, and is deeply committed to mentoring students with disabilities. Maria's current book project, Redefining Endometriosis (Palgrave), blends archival research and autotheory to examine endometriosis and the gendered politics of pain. Her work foregrounds access not as an afterthought, but as the foundation for feminist futures.

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Stephanie Andrea Allen

Women of Color Caucus Co-Chair, 2024-2026

Dr. Stephanie Andrea Allen (she/her) is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, creative writer, small press publisher, and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research centers Black lesbian cultural histories and Black feminisms through various expressions, including literature, film, and other print and visual media. Her current book project “We Must Document Ourselves Now:” Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation, (under contract at The Ohio State University Press), examines the essential, but oft-ignored importance of Black lesbian literature and visual media in queer literary and film histories. Her scholarly writing can be found in Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Archeion: Journal of Queer Archives, Feminists Talk Whiteness, Sinister Wisdom, and in other academic spaces.

Dr. Allen is also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press. Her creative work can be found in various online and print publications, including The Black Femme Collective, Mom Egg Review, Star*Line, Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and in her two short story collections, A Failure to Communicate and How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions. When she has time, Dr. Allen can be found making artisan soap and playing with her recently adopted kitten, James Midnight.

Contact Dr. Allen

Dominique C. Hill

Lesbian Caucus Chair, 2024-2026

Dr. Dominique C. Hill (she/her) is a scholar-creative and vulnerability guide invested in intergenerational dialogues, practices toward indivisible freedom, as well as creative and culturally-located methodologies. Hill’s written and performed scholarship interrogates twenty-first century Black girlhood with a focus on embodiment. In Hill’s scholarship, the body functions as a central way of knowing and site of unlearning and retooling.

Raised by three generations of women who know the power of prayer and libations, Hill’s living, art, and research is grounded in collectivity and imagination. Hill continues this intergenerational and spiritual work as a homegirl of Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a core collective member of Street Dance Activism, the divine guide of the 28 Day Global Dance Meditation, and as co-visionary of Hill L. Waters (HLW). An arts-based research collaborative that enacts Black queer world making as embodied pedagogy, HLW conducts workshops and uses performance ethnography to write and narrate works dedicated to Black liberation. Hill is co-author of the recently published Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet (Routledge, 2022) and Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body (Brill|Sense, 2019). Through research, pedagogy, and praxis, Hill extends the field of Black Girlhood Studies as an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Colgate University. @Drhillgroove (on Instagram)

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Heidi R. Lewis

Immediate Past President, 2025-2026

Dr. Heidi R. Lewis (she/her) is David & Lucile Packard Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Gender & Women's Studies. Her areas of specialization are Feminism (emphasis Black Feminism), Hip Hop (emphasis Rap), and Media Studies.

In addition to her forthcoming manuscript, “Make Rappers Rap Again!: Interrogating the Mumble Rap ‘Crisis’” (Oxford UP, 2025), Lewis is working on a documentary on her experiences coming of age in northeast Ohio during the crack cocaine epidemic. Previously, she co-authored In Audre's Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk and published in Womanism Rising, the second volume of Rethinking Women's & Gender Studies, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and Unteilbar: Bündnisse gegen Rassismus. She has also contributed to NewBlackMan, NPR, Ms., Bitch, and Act Out and given talks at Vanderbilt, the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, the University of Georgia, the Kampagne für Opfer Rassistischer Polizeigewalt, and other organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Berlin.

Lewis has been an active member of NWSA since 2008, starting with her participation in the Women of Color Leadership Project. In addition to being selected to attend the Curriculum Institute in 2014 and regularly attending the Chairs and Directors Meeting since 2018, she also served as Secretary position from 2021-2022. She is honored and excited to serve as President from 2023-2025. As she noted during the 2023 membership assembly meeting, “As your President, I will remain committed to centering the most vulnerable, ensuring they are engaged and supported, not merely seen rather than heard and felt. I do not, never have, and never will claim to have all the experiences and expertise required to do so, which is why I remain committed to collaboration, solidarity, accountability, and reciprocity. I know I am because we are. I also know my leadership will be guided by the ancestral wisdom of Audre Lorde, Grace Lee Boggs, Marsha P. Johnson, Fatema Mernissi, Ika Hügel-Marshall, Sylvia Rivera, bell hooks, Lorelei DeCora Means, and so many others. At the same time, my work will necessarily be done in the spirit of patience, as well as thoughtful and intentional urgency, for as the late great Toni Cade Bambara reminds us, ‘Not all speed is movement.’”

Contact Dr. Lewis

Past Leadership

The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) became an official incorporated non-profit (a 501c3) on May 18,1978 and has since grown through the leadership and service of over 470 activists, artists, educators, and luminaries that represent(ed) the utility and reach of a women's, gender, and sexuality studies-grounded education. 

We find it vital to highlight past Association leaders on the Governing Council to illustrate the multivocality of the field and their contributions to the impact of NWSA.

View Past Governing Council Members