Matilde Moros Annual Lecture
The Matilde Moros Annual Lecture honors the life and work of Matilde Moros, Ph.D., a beloved faculty member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies who passed away in 2023.
This lecture brings scholars, activists, and community members to campus to address topics and themes that were deeply important to her— including Latinx studies, social transformation and justice, ethics, and spirituality and theology.
2027 Speaker
Ashley Coleman Taylor, Ph.D.
Ashley Coleman Taylor, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of religious studies and women’s and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As an interdisciplinary ethnographer of circum-Caribbean descent, she specializes in the intersecting lived experiences of embodiment, Black genders, and Africana religions in Puerto Rico and her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Her book-in-progress is tentatively titled “Majestad Negra: Race, Class, Gender and Religious Experience in the Puerto Rican Imaginary.” It is an intersectional Black feminist approach to race, class, gender, and coloniality in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was a finalist for the University of Illinois/National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize.
- 2025: Rachel Valentina González-Martin, Ph.D.
- 2024: The Beehive Design Collective
- 2023: Sabrina Melendez
About Matilde Moros, Ph.D.
Matilde Moros was born in Venezuela and raised between the United States and Latin America, an upbringing as a member of a binational, multicultural family that shaped her transnational, decolonial, feminist work in religious social ethics. Exposed as a child to human rights work in Latin America and to the first Sanctuary Movement, she later studied the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a political science student at the College of Wooster, and her scholarship ever after centered on the counter-hegemonic practices of the most vulnerable, “otros saberes” such as the Latin American method of “testimonio,” a counter-narrative form of truth telling. Her research addressed how communities respond to gender and sexual violence, and how silences are broken and resistance revealed.
At VCU, she published book chapters and reviews, produced podcasts and a video series, and collaborated with organizations including the American Academy of Religion, the Hispanic Theological Initiative, and the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. She taught courses in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, Latinx feminisms, mujerista ethics, and decolonial feminisms to students she cherished, often greeting them from the backyard gazebo of her Richmond home.