Melissa J. Wilde

Melissa J. Wilde is a sociologist of religion and inequality. She is currently serving as the Chair of the Department of Sociology. She joined the department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where she was undergraduate chair from 2013-2017. She has published award-winning articles in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. Her recent book, Birth Control Battles, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to eugenicist views of race, immigration and manifest destiny.