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

Heidi R. Lewis

President, 2023-2025

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 Feminist Theory and Politics (emphasis on Black Feminism), Hip Hop Discourse (emphasis on Rap), and Critical 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 President Lewis

Hiram Ramirez

Treasurer, 2024-2026

Dr. Hiram Ramirez (he/him) is Assistant Vice President for Inclusive Excellence and Strategic Initiatives at Miami University. His current role is focused on collaborating with campus stakeholders (faculty, staff, and students) to advance strategic initiatives geared towards embedding Inclusive Excellence throughout the institution. He is passionate about inclusive excellence as a pathway for co-constructing campus culture with faculty, staff, and students. During his 15 years in higher education, he has been an inclusive leader who strives to innovate and transform communities through structural changes.

He coordinates and leads efforts that encompass capacity-building opportunities, leverage data to inform project development and implementation of best practices, grant writing projects, communications and marketing content strategy, and other major strategic initiatives to foster an inclusive and welcoming campus community. His work focuses on cultivating culture change through collaborations and intentional research-based approaches, to create sustainable changes at Miami that foster inclusive workplaces, classrooms, and the campus community more broadly. 

As a scholar, his research is anchored in American higher education and has explored: 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. 

When he is not championing inclusive excellence or supporting the various projects within the office, he can be found wrangling one of his four cats with his husband to cuddle and enjoy a good fantasy book. 

Contact Treasurer Ramirez

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

Kristina Gupta

Member-at-Large, 2023-2025

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 the Members-at-Large

Latoya Lee

Member-at-Large, 2023-2025

Dr. Latoya Lee (she/her) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Dr. Lee received her B.A. and accelerated M.A. degree in Sociology from St. John’s University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology at SUNY Binghamton, where she was awarded a competitive diversity fellowship. As a scholar, her research focuses on the ways in which people of color use social media for political organizing, social transformation, the (re)making of value systems and resistant possibilities.


Tied to her research and experience, as a first-generation Afro-Caribbean woman, Dr. Lee is sensitive to issues of diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom and makes a concerted effort to encourage students to open their minds to new ways of seeing. To meet this end, her pedagogical approach promotes the idea that a new way of seeing is inseparable from reading a diverse body of texts as well as be(com)ing attentive to their own physical bodies, and how they differ from those of others.

Dr. Lee has been invited to speak at various venues, public radio and have shared her work at various academic conferences.

Contact the Members-at-Large

Jessica N. Pabón

Member-at-Large, 2024-2026

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 the Members-at-Large

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.

Sabah Uddin

Women of Color Caucus Co-Chair, 2024-2025

Dr. Sabah Uddin (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies at Bowie State University.

Dominique C. Hill

Lesbian Caucus Chair, 2024-2026

Dr. Dominique C. Hill 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)

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