Participant Info
- First Name
- Samira
- Last Name
- Mehta
- Country
- United States
- State
- smehta@post.harvard.edu
- Affiliation
- Albright College
- Website URL
- www.samiramehta.com
- Keywords
- interfaith families, religion and contraception, birth control, American Judaism, American religions, religion in the US, American Christianity, religion and politics, religion and the family, 20th century, Chrismukkah, religion and popular culture, religion and material culture
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Samira K. Mehta is an Assistant Professor at Albright College. Her research focuses on American religious cultures and the politics of family life in 20th and 21st century US. The author of Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Mehta’s current project, God Bless the Pill? Sexuality, Contraception, and American Religion examines the role of liberal Jewish and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She is the co-chair of the Religions and Families in North America AAR Seminar Group and on the steering committee of the North American Religions Program Unit. 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, and the Northeastern Regional Fellowship Consortium.
- Recent Publications
Books
Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian–Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
Selected Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“Family Planning is a Christian Duty: Religion, Population Control, and the Pill in the 1960s,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States, eds. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
“Chrismukkah: Multicultural Millennialism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 25, no. 1 (2015): 82-109.
“I Chose Judaism, but Christmas Cookies Chose Me: Food, Identity, and Familial Religious Practice in Christian/Jewish Blended Families,” in Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, ed. Benjamin E. Zeller et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 154-172.
Selected Public Essays
“Believer, Religious Studies, and the Public,” The Immanent Frame, July 6, 2017, https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/07/06/believer-religious-studies-and-the-public/
“Christmas and Hanukkah, Together Again.” Religion and Politics. December 20, 2016. “Interfaith Kids Are Still Being Raised Jewish. Here’s How.” The Forward. October 26, 2016.
- Media Coverage
- https://www.npr.org/2016/12/24/506849949/chrismukkah-interfaith-families-negotiate-a-christmas-hanukkah-combination
- Social Media
- samira_k_mehta
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- North America
- Expertise by Chronology
- 20th century, 21st century
- Expertise by Topic
- Children & Youth, Family, Food History, Gender, Material Culture, Medicine, Museums, Pedagogy, Public History, Religion, Sexuality, Women
