Jessica Hayes-Conroy

Jessica Hayes-Conroy is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectional Justice and Chair of Public Health at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography and Women's Studies from Penn State University in 2009, an M.A. in Geography from the University of Vermont, and a B.A. in The Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.

Her research lies at the intersection of food activism, bodily health, and socio-spatial difference, with a focus on critical nutrition, visceral geographies, and decolonial dietary interventions. She explores how school gardens, cooking programs, and embodied experiences of food can foster social change and challenge neoliberal health paradigms. Her recent work critically examines how nutrition can be practiced in ways that honor social inequality, cultural traditions, and embodied difference.

Her scholarship includes a monograph, Savoring Alternative Food: School Gardens, Visceral Experience, and Social Difference (Routledge, 2014), and co-edited volume Doing Nutrition Differently (Ashgate, 2013). Her articles, published in journals such as Environment and Planning A, Gender, Place and Culture, and Gastronomica, reveal consistent engagement with interdisciplinary themes including food justice, affective geographies, and the political ecology of the body.

• One of her articles, 'Veggies and Visceralities,' has been recognized as one of the most cited in Emotion, Space and Society since 2012.
• She frequently collaborates with her sister, Allison Hayes-Conroy, on topics related to visceral politics and critical nutrition.

Hayes-Conroy teaches courses such as The Politics of Health, Food, Feminism, and Health, and Gender and Geography, reflecting her interdisciplinary commitment to linking feminist theory, public health, and spatial justice. She has no listed scientific awards or students in the provided text but remains an active scholar in critical food and health studies.