Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies
Phone: (405) 325-3973
Email: mchen@ou.edu
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Dr. Melinda Chen
Melinda Chen, PhD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Chen is a transdisciplinary advocate-scholar who brings a feminist and intersectional harm reduction and empowerment model to her research and in the classroom.
Dr. Chen’s scholarship examines sexual violence, queer of color critique, public policy and health, welfare reform, and feminist and queer/ing methodologies. Her first book, Killing Radicalism: Anti-Rape Advocacy Reimagined (NYU Press, 2026), interviewed 63 rape victim advocates about their lived experiences working in the field and makes the argument that, when advocacy is bound to neoliberal state funding conditions, advocacy has disparate, re-victimizing effects on marginalized survivors (e.g., BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, etc.). These re-victimization practices are subliminal to the advocates’ eyes but will lead to the downfall of radical resistance, unless concrete action is taken now to reimagine the purpose and futures of victim advocacy. Dr. Chen’s second book, The Native Justice Project, is coauthored with Sarah Deer, JD (Muscogee Creek) and under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. This book listens to the stories of 51 Indigenous women and Two-Spirit survivors of rape and hate crimes to conceptualize justice outside the binary between carceral and restorative, cultivating sovereign Native justice.
Dr. Chen teaches in the areas of feminist and queer/ing methodologies and theories, violence and crime, social justice, and 2SLGBTQIA+ studies. She also has experience teaching in the field of transnational and globalization studies, and teaching for general public audiences. Students in Dr. Chen’s classroom develop critical thinking around issues pertaining to intimate violence, empowerment, and identities. We learn to take our theoretical discussions and turn them into real-world, applied social action.
At OU, Dr. Chen has taught the following courses:
- Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
- Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies
- Social Justice & Social Change
- Sex, Race & Violence
- Feminist Research Methods
Dr. Chen received her PhD and MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas and her BA in Global Liberal Studies, concentrating in Law, Ethics & Religion, from New York University.
Publications
- Chen, M. (2026). Killing Radicalism: Anti-Rape Advocacy Reimagined. NYU Press.
- Chen, M. (2025). “Feminists Disrupt Power: Rape & the Heterogeneity of Subjugated Resistance.” In Hemangini Gupta, Kelly Sharron, Carly Thomsen, and Abraham Weil (Eds.), Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader. Routledge. ISBN 9781032377186
- Chen, M. (2023). “Are you—?” “Are you?” Queer Advocacy at Contemporary Neoliberal Rape Crisis Centers. Violence Against Women 29(15-16): 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012231192606
- Chen, M. (2022). The Compounded2 Nature of the Covid Pandemic on Survivors of Sexual Violence. Social Movement Studies 0(0): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2134110
- Chen, M. (2021). Research Brief: Evaluating Secondary Traumatic Stress on Victim Advocates Using the Helpfulness Rating on Service Intake Forms as a Scale. KU ScholarWorks. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/32170
