Dr. Samira K. Mehta is Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently on leave from serving as the Director of Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of American family life and reproduction. She is an expert on interfaith, interracial, and multicultural experiences in the United States.

Dr. Mehta’s 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. She also published a book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023), which Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023” called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.” Her most recent monograph, God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), 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.

She is currently working on 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. She serves as a series editor for the North American Religion series at NYU Press.

Professor Mehta has been a research associate and the Colorado Scholar in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, a visiting associate professor of North American Religion at Harvard Divinity School, and a Larson Fellow of the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and Emory University.