Samira Mehta

Samira K. Mehta's 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. She has a book of essays forthcoming from Beacon Press called The Racism of People Who Love You.

Mehta’s current project, God Bless the Pill? Sexuality, Contraception, and American Religion 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. Research from this project appears in “Family Planning is a Christian Duty: Religion, Population Control, and the Pill in the 1960s” from Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth- Century United States.

She is the co-chair of the Religions and Families in North America Seminar of the American Academy of Religion and serves on the steering committee of the North American Religions Program Unit of the AAR. Mehta has held fellowships from the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sloan Foundation’s Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, the American Jewish Archives, and the Northeastern Regional Fellowship Consortium, among others. She recently received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a project entitled "Jews of Color: Histories and Futures." Mehta holds degrees from Emory University, Harvard University, and Swarthmore College.