Tamara Lea Spira is an interdisciplinary feminist and queer theorist whose work lies at the intersections of critical race, Latin American, and transnational American Studies. She is currently an Associate Professor of Queer Studies and American Studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. Dr. Spira obtained her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz and was also UC  President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis.

Professor Spira is the author of Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times UC Press, 2025) and Movements of Feeling: Feminist Radical Imaginations in Neoliberal Times (University of Washington Press, under contract). Her writings on the intimate politics of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and state violence have also been published in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies, including Boundary2, Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Identities, Signs, and Abolition Feminisms. Her new book project, Life Before Conception: Gamete Personhood in a time of Ecocide, examines the legal conferment of personhood to preborn life accompanying the intensified forms of premature death that greet the majority of the world’s children—and the planet itself—in a battle over futures. Dr. Spira is also at work on a collection of prose and poetry called Two Deathbeds and the Tending of Fires.

Spira’s academic work and public scholarship are  informed by her long standing participation within anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and transnational feminist and queer movements. From 2013-2014, she served as a Research Scholar at the Beatrice Bain Research Center at UC Berkeley, where she coordinated the collective project, “Archiving 1960s and 1970s Third World and Anti-Colonial Feminist and Queer Transnational Solidarities." She has also worked with a range of NGOs and movement organizations, including the United Nations, the Astraea Lesbian Fund for Justice, Justice Now, Critical Resistance, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the UC Berkeley Labor Center. From 2020-2021, she was a “Beyond Health” Fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute. 

Professor Spira enjoys supporting a new generation of brilliance through student writing, publication, and organizing. Her classes interrogate the intersections and disjunctures between anti-racist, queer of color, anti-imperialist, decolonial and Black feminist movements, with a focus on bridging movements and cultivating new generations of struggle.