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Sonja Thomas

Title

Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Information

Address

8800 Mayflower Hill Waterville, Maine 04901-8853

Current Courses

CRS Title Sec
WG215 Indian Matchmaking A
WG223J Educated Feet: Black Feminisms and Tap Dance A
WG493 Sem: Capstone in WGSS A

Education

  • Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2011
  • B.A., University of Minnesota, 2001

Areas of Expertise

  • South Asian feminisms/South Asian diaspora
  • Transnational feminisms
  • Caste and race
  • Rural Montana
  • Tap dance

Personal Information

Sonja Thomas is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Colby College, where she teaches courses on critical caste and critical race theory, feminist theory, transnational feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, and tap dance.  She is the author of Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India.  At Colby, she worked to add caste to the non-discrimination policy and to create the Provost’s Initiative on Caste.  She is currently researching and writing her second book on race, caste, settler colonialism and Catholic missionary priests from India serving in rural Montana and North Dakota. The project is titled Indians and Cowboys: Race, Caste, and Indian Missionary Priests in Rural America.  The book is under contract with University of Washington Press.

Sonja is associate editor for South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. She served as secretary for the National Women’s Studies Association 2020-21. And she is currently serving as the faculty member for Maine’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations.

Her other research interest is tap dance. She has written articles on tap history and blackface in Asia. She teaches tap dance and race in a course at Colby called “Educated Feet: Black Feminist Thought and Tap Dance. 

When she’s finished writing Indians and Cowboys, she plans to write a trade press book on the 1961 Babe Ruth World Series hosted in her hometown, Glendive, Montana.  If We Build It, They Will Come: The Unlikely Story of the 1961 Babe Ruth League World Series.

Publications (South Asian/Diaspora Studies)

Publications (Tap Dance)

Other Public Scholarship

Media Interviews