About

Melinda Plastas is Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include race and social movements, gender and militarization, health justice,  tobacco capitalism, art and resistance. Plastas is the author of the book A Band of Noble Women: Race Politics and the Women’s Peace Movement.

At Bates, Plastas teaches courses and advises theses for American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and History. Plastas also currently heads the program in American Studies and previously chaired the program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Selected Publications

Review: Laura E. Helton, “Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History.” Journal of American History, Volume 112, Issue 2, September 2025, Pages 374–376.

Review: Wiegand and Shirley A Wiegand, “The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism.” Journal of American History, March, 2019, 105(4): 1085-86.

Review: Sarah L. Silkey, “Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism.” Journal of American History, September 1, 2016, 103(2): 483-483.

“Contemplating Tobacco,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol 12, No. 2 (2016), ISSN: 1557-2935  http://liminalities.net/12-2/tobacco.pdf

Guest editor with Maria Rentetzi, “Tobacco Roads: Histories of Technologies in a Transnational Economy,” Special Issue of Advances in Historical Studies, Vol 5, No 2, April 2016. 

Melinda Plastas and Eve Raimon, “Brutality and Brotherhood: James Baldwin and Prison Sexuality” Special Issue: James Baldwin, African American Review, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2013, 687-699.

Melinda Plastas and Lisa Botshon, “Homeland In/Security: Teaching Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Feminist Teacher, Volume 20, No 1, 2009, 1-14.

“A Different Burden: Race and the Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch,” Peace and Change, October 2008, Volume 33, Issue 4, 469-506

Plastas has been active in numerous Maine organizations including Maine Initiatives and the Maine Humanities Council. 

Expertise

Social movements, African American history, Cultural studies, Black Feminisms, critical race theory,  Gender and Sexuality studies, health justice, commodities studies, Peace studies, transnationalism, tobacco capitalism, art and resistance.