Biography
Melanie Boyd teaches in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies when she can, but is primarily housed in the Yale College Dean’s Office, where she runs the Office of Gender and Campus Culture, advises the student-run Women’s Center. Both her scholarly and administrative work focuses on gender, sex, and sexuality, with a particular attention to issues of sexual violence and cultural transformation. She works with a broad range of colleagues and students to help ensure that Yale’s strategies for addressing sexual misconduct are as effective as possible. Among other things, her office runs the Consent and Communication Educators program, in which a diverse group of undergraduates work within and across communities to foster a more positive sexual climate at Yale. In alternate years, she teaches “Theorizing Sexual Violence” for the WGSS program. Her scholarly writings have focused on the rhetorical deployment of suffering in feminist anti-violence literature—in the use of victimhood as central site from which to articulate political and ethical imperatives, and in the flows of agency around and through such intimate articulations. More recently, she has been working on a theoretical analysis of sexual assault prevention programs on college campuses. She holds a BA in Women’s Studies from Yale, an M.A. in Women’s Studies from Emory, and a PhD in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan.
