Millie Thayer

Millie Thayer retired in 2023 from the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was affiliated with the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, the Ethnography Collective, and Colectiva Protesta, an international research group on Latin American feminist protest. She earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004.

Her research focuses on topics including transnational feminisms, the nexus between international funding and feminist movements in Latin America and Southern Africa, and the work experiences of immigrant farm workers in Western Massachusetts. She published a monograph, Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil (Routledge, 2010); as well as four co-edited volumes: Transnational Feminist Itineraries (Duke, 2021) with Ashwini Tambe; Beyond Civil Society: Social Movements, Civic Participation and Democratic Contestation (Duke, 2017) with Sonia Alvarez et al; Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Americas (Duke, 2014) with Sonia Alvarez et al; and Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (University of California, 2000) with Michael Burawoy et al. She has published articles in Ethnography, Social Problems, Feminist Studies, Revista Pagu and Revista Estudos Feministas, and a co-authored essay in Signs. She has won fellowships or grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Ford Foundation (with Sonia Alvarez et al), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has spent 11 of the last 19 years on the Feminist Studies Editorial Collective.