Layli Maparyan
Katherine Stone Kaufmann '67
Executive Director
- Ph.D., Temple University
- layli[dot]maparyan@wellesley[dot]edu
- CV
Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women; expert on the womanist worldview and activist methodology
Layli Maparyan, Ph.D., is the Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women and Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known for her scholarship in the area of womanism and is the author of two groundbreaking texts in the field of womanist studies, The Womanist Reader (Routledge, 2006) and The Womanist Idea (Routledge, 2012); a third book is forthcoming. Maparyan has also published significantly in the areas of adolescent development, social identities, (including biracial/biethnic identity and the intersections of racial/ethnic, sexual, spiritual/religious, and gender identities), Black LGBTQ studies, Hip Hop studies, and history of psychology.
Maparyan’s scholar-activist work interweaves threads from the social sciences and the critical disciplines, incorporating basic and applied platforms around a common theme of integrating identities and communities in peaceable, ecologically sound, and self-actualizing ways.
