Chris Bobel

Chris Bobel likes to study what is often ignored, silenced or shamed.

Chris is Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches courses on Gender & the Body, Feminist Theory, Feminist Research Methods, Gender & Race in US Social Movements, Global LGBTQ+ Activism, and Feminist Activism. During 2024-25, she designed and taught courses in the Gender Studies PhD program at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer.

For over two decades, Chris has been a pathbreaking force in menstrual activism, arguing that menstrual health is not a niche concern but a matter of human rights and reproductive justice. She is past president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and a frequent media voice on the politics of menstruation. Her books New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation and The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South — winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association — have shaped the field. Her co-edited Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, published open-access, has been downloaded over 3.7 million times worldwide.

Now, Chris's scholarship has taken a profoundly personal turn. After the death of her teenage daughter, she found herself drawn into grief and death studies — not despite her identity as an activist-scholar, but because of it. Her forthcoming seventh book, Accidental Activism: From Grief to Action after Traumatic Loss (Open Access with NYU Press), weaves together interviews with grieving activists and her own story, illuminating how trauma can become a catalyst for social change.

Chris also serves as Book Review Editor for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and co-edited a special issue on "Feminism, Antifeminism and the Mobilization of Regret" with Laura Green (due out in WINTER 2027)