Sameena Mulla (she/her/hers)

Sameena Mulla is an Associate Professor at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her main focus was the examination of the intersection of health care and the law when it comes to sexual assault cases. Mulla did her research over four years in 2002 when she was a rape crisis advocate in a Baltimore emergency room. There she was able to make observations on sexual assault responses in the forensic age. She explains that in the rush to make sure the evidence is still viable for the court, oftentimes lead to the  patient's needs being neglected or forgotten.

Mulla started her anthropology journey by getting her B.A. in Anthropology along with her B.A. in English at the University of Maryland, College Park in May of 1999. She then went on to get an M.A. in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in May of 2001. Then in August of 2008, she got her Ph.D. in Anthropology at John Hopkins University, Department of Anthropology. From 1999 to 2001 she was an Assistant to the Associate Dean at Eugene Lang College. From 2007 to 2008 she worked at Williams College doing research, teaching, and writing. From 2008 to 2016 she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and then an Associate Professor of Anthropology from 2016 to 2021 at Marquette University. In 2021, she became an Acting Associate Professor and then in 2022, she became an Associate Professor at Emory University. 

Mulla’s first book was called “The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention” which was published by the New York University Press in 2014. This book gave explicit details of what Mulla had seen and experienced as a rape crisis advocate while working in that Baltimore hospital. Her book argues that the process of care that is given to those going through sexual assault examinations which are both legal and therapeutic practices, forces a form of structural violence on the victims of sexual assault. For this book, Mulla won the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association’s Margaret Mead Award.

Mulla’s next book was a collaboration with Heather R. Hlavka to write “Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication” which was published by New York University Press in 2021. Mulla’s first book about the process of sexual assault examinations and forensic evidence collection goes perfectly into their new book which focuses less on sexual assault itself, but more on the damaging effects of the legal processes that come with sexual assault trials. They fight to break the stereotypes made about sexual assault in which racist, gendered, and classist themes emerge. This book won the 2021-2022 AES Senior Book Prize, awarded by the American Ethnological Society, and was an Honorable Mention for the Senior Book Prize of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. 

Mulla is also the founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Feminist Anthropology which was founded in 2019. This is the official journal of the Association of Feminist Anthropology. She is also one of the academic editors of the Cornell University Press series, Police/Worlds: Studies in Policing, Crime, and Governance. This leads to her current fieldwork which is about civilian oversight of policing and the different approaches to racialized police brutality. This work is being subsidized by a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

In recent news, protests have been happening across college campuses in Atlanta against Cop City. Students are demanding cancellation of the Cop City lease and all contractors and funders of this project cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. Emory University, where Mulla is a professor, is one of the schools that are holding organized protests against Cop City. On April 24th, Mulla joined her students protesting during class and said on Twitter, “They and the organizers who brought these actions to our campuses are our greatest teachers.”. Mulla has retweeted that Emory PD had threatened to arrest all students that were occupying the quad in tents to protest Cop City. I thought that this connected with Mulla’s current study of policing and the different approaches to racialized police brutality.

Stonefield, Brooke, 2023 "Sameena Mulla (1977)". CounterCanon Project. Department of Anthropology. Wheaton College.