Biography

Kathleen McIntyre is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She specializes in religion, indigenous peoples, and gender in modern Latin America.

Her book, Protestantism and State Formation in Post-Revolutionary Oaxaca (2019, University of New Mexico Press), examines religious conflict and traditional governance in Native communities of southern Mexico. McIntyre’s current research project, “Protestant Women and Political Activism in Mexico, 1900-1955,” examines how Protestant women conceptualized citizenship after the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The book explores the interrelated themes of educational reform, sports culture, temperance, suffrage, and transnational women’s rights groups, as well as Protestant women’s relations with Catholic women.

She received a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipends award for her research on the political life of Protestant women. A former American Association of University Women fellow, she also participated in the 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities “Women’s Suffrage in the Americas” Summer Institute.  In 2024-2025, Dr. McIntyre was on sabbatical and served as a  Fulbright-García Robles Research Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico. She was a guest scholar at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Pacífico Sur where she worked on a study  entitled “Agrarianism, Participatory Indigenismo and Zapotec Radicalism in Oaxaca’s Central Valley, 1971-1979.”  Read more about Dr. McIntyre’s fellowship here.

Dr. McIntyre teaches Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies, International Women’s Issues, GWS Capstone, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America, and has led a URI J-Term program in Cuba. At present, she is interested in researching gender and religion in video games. In 2026,  she was awarded “Mentor of the Year” by the Gender and Sexuality Center at URI. She regularly supports undergraduate research, including GWS students’ biographical sketches of African American suffragists in Rhode Island, published in the Online Biographical Dictionary of the  Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States. In summer of 2026, she was a faculty sponsor for A&S Fellows Program undergraduate project on Video Gaming and Sexuality.