Clara Montague

Clara Montague is a Lecturer in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MIT. Her research focuses on the politics of knowledge production across differences, examining how feminist academic networks resist backlash against diversifying higher education. She leads the digital project Women's Studies Worldwide, integrating cartography, archiving, interviews, and literary analysis to study the field's transnational development.

• Educated with a PhD from the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (2023)

Clara's scholarly interests include abolitionist feminisms, art activism, and digital humanities pedagogy. She previously collaborated with Grinnell College's Liberal Arts in Prison Program and served as a copyeditor for Feminist Studies journal. Her teaching at MIT spans foundational courses like WGS.101 Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies and specialized offerings such as WGS.S10 Studying Women and Gender at MIT and WGS.118 Gender in the Visual Arts, emphasizing feminist methods, intersectionality, and institutional change.

She has received prestigious support including:

• Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Turkey

Clara actively engages with diverse student cohorts through core curriculum instruction, place-based learning, and mentorship of independent research projects. Her work contextualizes academic feminism within contemporary debates about higher education's role in social justice movements.