ALUMNI/AE PROFILE: MNEESHA GELLMAN '03

MOTHER OF INTERVENTION

Mneesha Gellman ’03 was on her own when it came time to decide where to go to college. Sitting at her kitchen table in Eureka, California, she laid out her college acceptance letters, mixed them up, closed her eyes, and let her finger drop. It landed on Bard. “After confirming my financial aid packet, and that I could defer for a year—I had plans to backpack through Mexico and Guatemala for nine months—I signed the forms,” she says.

Once those travels were over, Gellman bought a one-way ticket to New York. Arriving in Annandale as a motivated activist, she soon found herself in a class taught by Omar Encarnación, a political studies professor who helped Gellman channel her outrage into academic research and writing. Four years later, while waiting outside his office as he and two other professors discussed her Senior Project, about the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the political economy of organic corn farming in Oaxaca, Mexico, she stood close enough to the door to hear Encarnación say, “I think she has the makings of a scholar.”

This was not an option Gellman had considered; no one in her family was an academic. But Encarnación’s words encouraged her to pursue an MA and then a PhD. Gellman’s time at Bard—including a yearlong study abroad program her junior year in which she traveled through England, Tanzania, India, the Philippines, and Mexico meeting grassroots activists, making friends, and learning how to analyze the sociopolitical world while navigating comfort and discomfort—put her on the path to her current position as an international comparative politics professor at Emerson College.

Converting negativity into something positive has been a recurring theme in Gellman’s life. Though she had an undergraduate punk-rock music phase as a singer and songwriter in the Electra Complex—the May 22, 2000, Bard Observer described the band’s music as “political hardcore songs, which incorporate feminist and earth-friendly lyrics”— that particular artistic expression has not found an outlet in her adult life, except in helping her identify with the rage and rebellion of her students. But much of the rest of her Bard experience has. As a first-year student with an incarcerated family member, Gellman was apprehensive of people’s judgments. But serving as a volunteer with the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) at Eastern and Beacon Correctional Facilities helped her transform what she calls “the baggage of my family experience” into a public good, and later led Gellman to start the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI). “Max Kenner ’01, Daniel Karpowitz, Jessica Neptune ’02, and many other BPI staff provided critical technical assistance in the early days of creating EPI, and still serve as mentors,” says Gellman. “Emerson College is a member of Bard’s Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, and I think of EPI as a sister program of BPI, ascribing to the same best practices of bringing the rigor and integrity of the traditional campus degree behind prison walls.”

Broadly speaking, Gellman’s work is about human rights and democratization, with a strong focus on minority rights. Her primary research has been on Indigenous and minority cultural survival, and particularly how historically marginalized communities in the Global South have organized and advocated for cultural rights. Most recently, she has been analyzing how access to Indigenous language classes and culturally relevant curricula in high schools in Mexico and the United States empowers Indigenous students to resist assimilation while boosting healthy youth identity. Gellman has also worked on behalf of Latinx wellbeing, specifically in asylum proceedings. She has served as an expert witness in nearly 100 asylum cases in US immigration courts, analyzing the risks of violence toward people from Mexico and El Salvador based on their identities. Additionally, she has engaged with Latinx immigrant youth in California to find ways for schools to better support them through education policies. Another area of focus is the politics of incarceration and education. What unites these activities, says Gellman, “is a commitment to support the rights and wellbeing of historically and contemporarily marginalized people. When states don’t respect people’s rights, intervention is necessary.” Gellman sees her work in education policy, expert witnessing, and EPI as such interventions. “When my life is helping make someone else’s better,” says Gellman, “the labor feels worth it.”

—Hattie Wilder Karlstrom ’20, HRA ’23