Abel R. Gomez is an ethnographer and interdisciplinary scholar . He earned his PhD in Religion as well as a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Women’s and Gender Studies from Syracuse University (Onondaga Nation territory). He is Assistant Professor in the Religion Department and affiliated faculty in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University. He serves as faculty advisor for the Native and Indigenous Students (NISA) student organization. Dr. Gomez was previously an Andrew W. Mellow Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma (Caddo and Wichita territory).
Dr. Gomez's research and teaching examine the relationships between sacred sites, ceremony, gender and sexuality, Indigenous cosmologies, and (de)colonization. He is currently at work on his manuscript titled Living on Ohlone Lands: Sacred Sites, Ceremony, and Solidarities. This book draws on his ethnographic research among Ohlone tribal communities in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay regions to theorize Indigenous revitalization and movements to protect sacred sites. Dr. Gomez is a steering committee member for the Native Traditions in the Americas Unit of the American Academy of Religion and served on the committee organizing the annual Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits Powwow in San Francisco. He serves on the advisory committee for Center for the Religion and Cities and a member of the Theories of Land working group through the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. In addition to work in the academy, Dr. Gomez is committed to public facing scholarship to amplify voices and movements of Indigenous sovereignty and decolonial futurity. Dr. Gomez is a first generation queer Latinx scholar. He descends from Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Mexican lineages that migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, the homeland of the Ohlone peoples. |
Download a copy of Abel's CV (updated March 2024)