Dr. Monica Mody is an award-winning poet and scholar, as well as the new Chair of the M.A./Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology. In this article, she contemplates leading the Mythological Studies program forward, as the first woman of color to hold the position. Read more about our Mythological Studies program here.
Graduates of our Mythological Studies MA/PhD program understand change: they come to understand it intimately through the mythic, archetypal, and sacred energies and patterns their psyche befriends as they go through the program, engaging with scholarship, ritual, self-inquiry, storytelling, and practice. I am so proud to celebrate our graduating PhD and MA students for having made friends with the powers of transformation; with the art of allowing and shaping change. As they stand ready at this threshold to take the step forward—having completed their studies or ready to begin writing their dissertations—my hope is they remember, and help us all remember, that they are the stories—theirs are the stories—the Earth needs; that the Underworld activates gifts of wisdom and insight; and that chaos leads, every time, to a reordering of the world. Here is to the remarkable medicine they be, become, and bring!
I was honored to deliver the above Commencement remarks to our graduating class of 2025, as they face a world changing at an unprecedented rate. And as our graduates become the stories the world so needs, Mythological Studies will continue to provide the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagements that serve as animating force in our complex, plural world. My priorities as Chair over the next few years cohere around areas that we as a program have decided to devote attention to:
- Ensuring that the collective pedagogical effort in the program remains infused with academic rigor, personal (soul) transformation, and care for the earth;
- Integrating diverse perspectives and pedagogies into the program curriculum so that these are in a non-dominant relation with eurowestern perspectives and pedagogies; welcoming decolonial, indigenous, and nonwestern understandings, frameworks, and epistemologies; creating responsive and innovative courses that speak to the local-global contexts of the students and faculty;
- Encouraging the writing and research of our graduate students;
- Better understanding how to support our graduate students regarding their career aspirations; bringing in people and building the infrastructure that could resource our students with knowledge and opportunities about the same;
- Creating robust connections with and collaborating with our alumni;
- Thinking through outreach strategies to improve enrollment of and ways to increase the sense of belonging of students of color and first-generation, mixed heritage, diasporic, and immigrant students.
We are in the midst of a core faculty hire, which, I am hopeful, will help us deepen into some of this work. We also are looking forward to hosting a few events that will be open to the community! For instance, on August 1, I am excited to host Dr. Ayesha Nadir Ali, who will join us to trace the mythic evolution of one of South Asia’s most enduring archetypes of the feminine. Her performance “Heer Across the Ages” will feature Indian ragas as well as folk and avant-garde Punjabi poetry, and afterwards, she and I will be in conversation to deepen into some of the themes of the evening. Also on the horizon, in a few months, is a Life After Myth Symposium in partnership with Pacifica Alumni Connections. As part of this, we want to invite Myth alumni to share their career journeys and insights. Links to the events will be available to the community as they are ready.
In the animist nondual worldview I carry, I find myself responsible to Earth and to the waters, ancestors and more-than-humans, humans and stones and stories and stars. They orient me to the way in which I approach my work as Program Chair and keep returning me to a more encompassing vision—and, to reverence. I am further guided by the values of wholeness and the both/and possibilities contemplated by women of color and transnational feminisms, Chicana and Black feminisms, and womanism. This guiding mythos—of a kind of wholeness that emerges out of interconnectedness—not sameness—attunes me to the many stories and mythological sensibilities our students and faculty bring as they participate with the world.
The significance of being the first woman of color Chair of the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica does not escape me. Success is not personal for BIPOC communities: The hope is that it creates pathways for collective upliftment and liberation. At Pacifica right now, we can count on one hand the number of women of color who are core faculty: I hope this will change. My appointment has led me to explore the various autoethnographies, narratives and counternarratives, personal reflections, testimonios, and other research and literature documenting how women of color in the academy—both in the U.S. context and in other western contexts—have “experienced, navigated, survived, and/or resisted” its borderlands (Cho et al. 2023, 729). Even as women of color in academia unsettle the status quo, they confront challenges both at the individual and the institutional level. I am aware that leadership roles across higher educational institutions are predominantly held by white male leaders (Esposito 2023). As Chair, I have the privilege and opportunity to take a leading role in conversations that may create relational change within our institutional space for the benefit of the whole. With all that I am learning, I would be honored to become a mentor and resource for others at Pacifica—including WOC faculty—as we continue to invite into our community brilliant scholars and practitioners who are committed to tending to the soul of the world.
May the stories we tell help us remember who we are!
Read more about our Mythological Studies program here.
REFERENCES
Cho, Katherine S., Racheal M. Banda, Érica Fernández, and Brittany Aronson. 2023. “Testimonios de Las Atravesadas: A Borderland Existence of Women of Color Faculty.” Gender, Work & Organization 30 (2): 724–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12894.
Esposito, Jennifer. 2023. “‘It’s Not Enough to Just Insert a Few People of Color:’ An Intersectional Analysis of Failed Leadership in Netflix’s The Chair Series.” Educational Studies 59 (1): 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2022.2153684.
Dr. Monica Mody is a Core Professor in the Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology Program. Her areas of specialization include decolonial, indigenous, and women of color paradigms and epistemologies; Anzaldúan frameworks; earth-sourced and feminist spirituality and ritual; poetry, divination, oracular speech, and arts-based research; and nondual embodiment, in conversation with ancestral lineages from South Asia. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Wild Fin (Weavers Press, 2024) and Bright Parallel (Copper Coin, 2023), the cross-genre Kala Pani (1913 Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks including Ordinary Annals (above/ground, 2021).
Dr. Mody’s academic publications include peer-reviewed articles in the Transformative Power of Art Journal and Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal For New Thought, Research, and Praxis, as well as essays in Tarka Journal and The Land Remembers Us: Women, Myth, and Nature. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-secular South Asian Borderlands: A Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness,” was selected for the Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology conferred by the Association for the Study of Women Mythology. She has presented widely, including at the El Mundo Zurdo Conference, the Parliament of World Religions, the Center for Black and Indigenous Praxis at CIIS, American Academy of Religion-Western Region, Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, Pacifica’s Journey Week, and Oakland Summer School.
Her poetry has been selected for honors including the Sparks Prize Fellowship (University of Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa University), and the TOTO Award for Creative Writing; it can be found in numerous international journals and anthologies. Venues that have invited her to share her poetry include the South Asian Literature & Arts Festival, Poetry with Prakriti, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Trauma and Catharsis Symposium on Performing the Asian Avant-Garde, the CIIS Women’s Spirituality Program, and Delta Mouth Literary Festival.
