Mneesha Gellman

Mneesha Gellman is an associate professor of political science at Emerson College whose research interests include comparative democratization, cultural resilience, memory politics, and education policy in the Global South and the United States. Her current research looks at how citizens are formed in the formal education sector and in community-run spaces organized around mother tongue and heritage language learning.

Gellman's latest book, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, November 2022),  examines how Indigenous high school students resist assimilation and assert their identities through access to Indigenous language classes in public schools.

Gellman also informs immigration court proceedings by serving as a pro bono expert witness for asylum hearings regarding conditions of violence in El Salvador, Mexico, and Turkey, where she works to provide specific political contexts of violence experienced by specific groups of people.

Additionally, Gellman is the founder/director of the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI), which brings high quality liberal arts education to incarcerated students at Massachusetts Correctional Institute (MCI) at Concord, a men's medium security prison. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University.