Catia Confortini
Associate Professor of Peace and Justice Studies

Scholar and activist around issues of peace and gender.

Catia Cecilia Confortini holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California's School of International Relations as well as a Masters Degree in International Peace Studies from the Joan B. Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Her book entitled Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (August 2012, Oxford University Press) examines the evolving and gendered understandings of peace in the longest-living and arguably most influential international women's peace organization in the world. Her research interests focus on the contribution of women's peace activism to peace studies as an academic field and as a practice. Her work on feminist peace studies is published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Feminist International Relations: Conversations about the Past, Present, and Future (eds Laura Sjoberg and J. Ann Tickner, Routledge 2011), Gender, War and Militarism (ed. by Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, Prager 2010), the International Studies Association's Encyclopedia, Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research, Peace Review, and Peace and Freedom, the magazine of the US Section of the WILPF. She is program chair-elect of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA), a member of the ISA Peace Studies Section, of the ISA Professional Development Committee, and of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Besides her academic work, Dr.Confortini has been involved in peace and justice activism at the local and international levels. She worked as a volunteer counselor/advocate for a domestic violence shelter in Long Beach, CA. She collaborated with a human rights organization and ran women’s human rights workshops in Chiapas, Mexico. She organized educational forums, and coordinated fundraising events for international peace organizations. She worked to mobilize support for several California legislative initiatives, such as the reform of the California Three Strikes Law, a death penalty moratorium and opposition to a California constitutional amendment precluding marriage rights to same sex couples. She is the US representative to WILPF’s International Board for 2011-2014.