Authentic Explorations: Shaping Our Spiritual Selves

Meredith Coleman-Tobias

Professor

Meredith Coleman-Tobias is Assistant Professor of Religion here at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in Caribbean and North American iterations of African Atlantic religious cultures. She is specifically interested in contemporary religious migrations, which she began to study during her tenure as a Fulbright fellow in Barbados (2009-2010). Her current research project focuses on Sobonfu Somé, a recently-deceased Burkinabé spiritual teacher and leader based in Sacramento, California. Investigating Somé’s ritual work and ‘mission’ in Western countries over the last two decades, she examines African and non-African descendants’ intentional practice of Dagara spirituality in North America as a lens through which to understand historical and contemporary Africana religious formations. She is writing a comprehensive, spirituo-biographic manuscript documenting Somé’s life and work. She brings to her research a background in community theater, and interrogations of performance, place-making and knowledge reproduction significantly inform her understanding of religious communities.

Coleman-Tobias earned her B.A. from Spelman College, M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and Ph.D. from Emory University.

Christian Feurstein

Director of Public Affairs and Media Relations

Christian Feuerstein has spent her career leveraging her communications expertise to do the impossible. She has been instrumental in advancing the missions of colleges and positioning them on local, national and international stages.

Prior to Mount Holyoke, Feuerstein has worked in higher education for institutions such as Johns Hopkins Medicine, Linfield College, and Sterling College in Vermont. As an alum of Antioch College, she mounted a compelling, flexible public relations and media campaign for the successful alum effort to reopen the college as an independent entity.

A native Chicagoan, Feuerstein can sing maybe half of the Bears fight song. She is married to Michael, who is from the South Bronx. In between raising two cats, they argue constantly about pizza.

Ali Aslam

Associate Professor of Politics

Ali Aslam is a political theorist whose research and teaching examine how citizens negotiate key concepts like freedom, recognition, and democracy through political struggle.  He is author of Ordinary Democracy: Sovereignty and Citizenship Beyond the Neoliberal Impasse (2017) and has published articles on social movements, including Black Lives Matter and Occupy.  He teaches courses on grassroots democracy, political economy, democratic theory and practice, and the history of political thought.

Rachel Alldis

Assistant Vice President of Student Engagement and Executive Director of Residential Life

Rachel Alldis joined Mount Holyoke College in July 2015. She is thrilled to be serving as the assistant vice president of Student Engagement and executive director of Residential Life. Rachel earned her bachelor's degree in communications from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where she also served as a peer health educator and resident assistant. This is where her love of student affairs and residential life began. Rachel pursued that love by getting her master's degree at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in College Student Personnel.

Rachel has since worked in Residence Life at Syracuse University, Emerson College and New York University. She most recently served as the director of Residence Life at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. At these institutions, she was able to develop her passion for community development and positive psychology.

Born in California and raised in Colorado, Rachel enjoys traveling, gardening, reading, seeing Broadway musicals and hanging out with friends in her free time. She loves working at Mount Holyoke College and being part of the vibrant community of amazing students, staff and faculty.

Ximena Abello Hurtado

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Critical Race and Political Economy

Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado is an Assistant professor of Africana Studies and Critical Race & Political Economy at Mouth Holyoke College. She is the author of Relato Histórico Nacional Colombiano and Partus Sequitur Ventrem (published by the Ministry of Culture in Colombia), and her essays have appeared in The Black Scholar." She co-authored "Demando mi libertad: Mujeres negras y sus estrategias de resistencia en la Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Cuba, 1700-1800," winner piece of the Monserrat Ordóñez LASA Prize as the best book on Colombian gender history in 2020.

Tim Dietrich

Technical and Event Production Manager, Chief Operator of WMHC