My name is Mneesha Gellman and I am an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College, in Boston, MA, USA. I have a range of research interests and expertise spanning democratization and democratic backsliding, minority rights, education politics, incarceration, and immigration in the Global South and the United States.
Since 2016, I have been working in collaboration with the Yurok Tribe's Education Department to document the impact of Indigenous-language access in public education in far northern California. I also work comparatively in southern Mexico on cultural resilience projects. My most recent book is Learning to Survive: Yurok Well-being in High School (University of Pennsylvania Press 2025).
I came to study education politics from memory politics. My first book, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador (Routledge 2017) examines how ethnic minority communities use memories of violence in mobilizations for cultural rights, particularly the right to mother tongue education. This led to my second book, Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States (University of Pennsylvania 2023), which looks at how decolonization of educational curricula impact students from a range of demographics. My third book, Misrepresentation in Silence in United States History Textbooks, analyzes representation of minority groups in high school history textbooks (Palgrave Macmillan 2024).
My interests in the rights of marginalized communities extend in many directions. I am the founding Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI), which seeks to bring a BA pathway to incarcerated students at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk (MCI-Norfolk), a men’s medium-security state prison. I edited Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach College in Prison (Brandeis University Press 2022), and I am co-editor with Justin McDevitt in Unlocking Potential: Education in Prison Around the World (Brandeis University Press 2024) .
Since 2016, I have served as an expert witness on country conditions for asylum hearings for people from El Salvador and Mexico, drawing from my longstanding research on the effects of state- and power-based violence on historically marginalized communities in those countries. My current research looks at state capacity to protect different categories of people, and the impact of immigration and deportation in California, Mexico, and El Salvador.
Prior to joining the faculty at Emerson College, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg, Germany, and I returned to Germany as a Senior Fellow in Education for Sustainable Peace at the Leibnitz Institute-Georg Eckert Institute in 2022. I have published widely, and many publications are linked in the thematic tabs at the top of this site in both English and Spanish.
I hold a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University, USA, and an MA in International Studies/Peace and Conflict Resolution from the University of Queensland, Australia, where I was a Rotary Peace Fellow in 2006-07. I have lived, worked, and studied on six continents – no Antarctica for me! My mantra is "There are many ways to live."