S. Lily Mendoza, Ph.D.

Professor
Office: 330 Wilson Hall
Phone: (248) 370-2685
Email: [email protected]

S. Lily Mendoza (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is a professor of culture and communication and is known for her path breaking work on the politics of indigeneity and critique of the cultural logic of modernity. She is the author of Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory and Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges. She has also published widely in various cultural and native studies journals and anthologies on questions of identity and subjectivity, cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts, discourses of indigenization, race, and ethnicity, and, more recently, civilization and climate change.

As an intellectual leader in her field, she has served a five-year term as Head of the International and Intercultural Communication Division of the National Communication Association in the United States. Passionate about sustainability, she spearheads the OU Campus Alliance for Sustainability and the Environment (CASE-OU), an intersectoral and interdisciplinary coalition of over 100 faculty, staff, student, and community members committed to building a culture of sustainability across campus. She is also the Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), a movement for decolonization and indigenization among diasporic Filipinos in North America and beyond. More recently, she has been invited to the Women Bridging Worlds, a mentoring circle of high-influence women fellows leading social movements for transformation hosted by the Bioneers Collective Heritage Institute.