Layli Maparyan

Layli Maparyan, Ph.D., is the Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women and Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Previously, she held academic posts at Georgia State University (in women’s studies) and the University of Georgia (in psychology and African-American studies). She has published three groundbreaking books on womanism: The Womanist Reader (Routledge, 2006), The Womanist Idea (Routledge, 2012), and Womanism Rising (University of Illinois Press, late fall 2024), in addition to the co-edited volume, The Bahá’í Faith and African American Studies: Perspectives on Racial Justice (Lexington, 2023). Her scholarly research has focused on social identities, social movements, and spirituality. She has served as a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Liberia helping to build a gender studies curriculum, as well as a Contemplative Practice Fellow with the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society focused on womanist spiritual activism.

Layli has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women since 2015. Currently, she serves as the Board Chair, as well as a member of the Executive, Governance, Program, Finance, Audit, Investment, and Development Committees. In addition to this service, Layli is a member of the Board of Directors of the University Consortium for Liberia, an organization committed to fostering collaborations between U.S. and Liberian higher education institutions, and a member of the Permanent Board of the Tahirih Justice Center, a Bahá’í-inspired nonprofit committed to aiding refugee and immigrant women who have experienced sexual or gender-based violence. She also serves in numerous institutional capacities with the Bahá’í community, including her Local Spiritual Assembly, Area Teaching Committee, Auxiliary Board Member Assistant, and the Africana Studies Working Group of the Association for Bahá’í Studies.

Born in New York, raised in Georgia and Florida, and currently residing in Massachusetts (USA), Layli has traveled extensively in Africa and has a second home in Liberia, West Africa. She has also spent considerable time in Ghana, Cape Verde, South Africa, and India, and is beginning new work that will take her to Kenya. Her passion is fostering human wellbeing on a global scale in ways that advance equality, justice, peace, and the oneness of humanity, and she loves the Global Fund for supporting grassroots women’s genius worldwide.