Lisa Bowleg, PhD, MA
Founder & President
Lisa a leading scholar of the application of intersectionality to social and behavioral sciences health equity research, is Professor of Applied Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the George Washington University (GW), and a Co-Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Core of the DC Center for AIDS Research (DC CFAR). She is also the Founder and President of the Intersectionality Training Institute. Informed by intersectionality and other critical theoretical frameworks, her mixed methods research projects examine the effects of social-structural stressors (e.g., unemployment, incarceration, police brutality), intersectional stigma and discrimination, and protective factors on the mental, substance use, HIV, and physical health outcomes of U.S. Black men at diverse intersections of socioeconomic status and sexuality. Another program of research examines the effects of intersectional discrimination and protective factors among Black lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the U.S. She has served as a principal investigator (PI) or joint PI of seven National Institutes of Health-funded projects and the WK Kellogg Foundation-funded, Intersectionality Policymaking Toolkit Project. Dr. Bowleg is the PI of two current NIH-funded intersectionality grants (NIMH: 1 R21 MH121313-01; NIDA: 1 R01 DA045773-01); a project director of an NIAID-funded intersectionality-focused DC CFAR Administrative Supplement; and the joint-PI (with Dr. Deanna Kerrigan) of a T32 grant (1 T32 MH130247-01), titled, Training Program in Approaches to Address Social-Structural Factors Related to HIV Intersectionally (TASHI). She has published widely in high impact journals such as American Psychologist, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), and Health Psychology. She is an associate editor at AJPH and the editor of AJPH’s Perspectives from the Social Sciences section, and an editorial board member or consulting editor of numerous journals including Archives of Sexual Behavior, Health Psychology, Social Science and Medicine, and the Journal of Sex Research. In May 2021, GW awarded her its Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Scholarship (Research). In February 2022, Health, Education and Behavior, the journal of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE), awarded her the 2021 Lawrence W. Green Paper of the Year Award in honor of her article, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: Ten Critical Lessons for Black and Other Health Equity Researchers of Color.” In 2023, NIMH named her the winner of its 2023 James S. Jackson Memorial Award.
A select list of her intersectionality publications:
- Bowleg, L. (2017). Intersectionality: An underutilized but essential theoretical framework for social psychology. In B. Gough (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology (pp. 507-529). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_25
- Bowleg, L., & Bauer, G. R. (2016). Invited reflection: Quantifying intersectionality. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 40(3), 337-341. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684316654282
- Bowleg, L. (2013). “Once you’ve blended the cake, you can’t take the parts back to the main ingredients”: Black gay and bisexual men’s descriptions and experiences of intersectionality. Sex Roles, 68(11), 754-767. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-012-0152-4
- Bowleg, L. (2012). The problem with the phrase "women and minorities": Intersectionality, an important theoretical framework for public health. American Journal of Public Health, 102(7), 1267-1273. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300750
- Bowleg, L. (2008). When Black + lesbian + woman ≠ Black lesbian woman: The methodological challenges of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality research. Sex Roles, 59, 312-325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-008-9400-z