WELCOME

I’m Jessica Nydia Pabón (she/ella), a diasporic Puerto Rican performance studies scholar of identity, community, and resistance. With me, feminism is a verb.

I was a tenured professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies until March 2025 when I resigned in protest of the university’s continued failure to take accountability for the brutal arrest of students peacefully encamped, or consider their demands for divestment companies profiting from the genocide in Palestine, in May 2024.

I work and live on the ancestral lands of the Munsee Lenape people, in the Hudson Valley of New York. I spend late summer and early fall as a butterfly doula, assisting monarchs on their migration journeys. Otherwise, I am likely behind a computer screen, in the kitchen baking sourdough anything, at my sewing table, playing with my dog, or in the forest admiring the moss with my child and partner.

I am the editor of the first English-language collection of Puerto Rican feminist writings—Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire (The Feminist Press, 2025)—and author of the first academic book on women in graffiti subculture—Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018).

I am currently serving as President for the National Women’s Studies Association.