About Me

Terah J. Stewart, Ph.D. (he/him) is a graduate faculty member and an assistant professor of higher education and student affairs at Iowa State University. He is also a faculty affiliate with Women and Gender Studies and the Director of the Education for Social Justice Graduate Certificate. His research and writing focus on people, populations, and ideas that are hyper marginalized and/or those who have stigmatized identities, including college students engaged in sex work and erotic labor, fat students on campus/fatphobia and sizeism in postsecondary contexts, and identity-based student activism. He also engages conceptual and empirical work on antiblackness in non-black communities of color. His work centers critical disruptive onto-epistemological frameworks and theories to destabilize dominant ways of knowing and being, including Black/endarkened feminist, womanist, and afropessimist perspectives.  

Dr. Stewart has notable practitioner and administrative experience in higher education and student affairs. Prior to his full-time faculty work, he served as the Assistant Director for Intercultural Programming and Strategic Initiatives of the Student Life Multicultural Center, Program Manager for the Office of the Vice President for Student Life, which included management of the campus-wide No Place for Hate Initiative, Graduate Student Support, and support of the Bias Assessment and Response Team all at the Ohio State University. He also has extensive experience in University Housing at OSU and the University of Georgia, where he managed assessment and evaluation for the department.

Dr. Stewart’s scholarship has often been called cutting-edge and groundbreaking work. He was named a 2023 Emerging Scholar by ACPA College Student Educators International and a 2024 Diverse Issues in Higher Education Emerging Scholar. He has received the Nevitt Sanford Award and the Burns B. Crookston Award, both for research endeavors from ACPA’s Commission for Faculty and Graduate Programs.  In 2023 he was awarded Outstanding Book for his unparalleled text Sex Work on Campus by the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He has also been recognized for his demonstrated teaching as the recipient of three teaching excellence awards from Iowa State University College of Human Sciences, the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching for his scholarship on teaching, and the Commission for Faculty and Graduate Programs of ACPA. He served as special issue co-editor of the Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education and published two teaching briefs for the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) and the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Iowa State.

His research and writing have appeared in Action Research, the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and the Journal of College Student Development. Dr. Stewart is co-author of Identity-Based Student Activism: Power and Oppression on College Campuses (2020, Routledge) and author of Sex Work on Campus (2022, Routledge).Contact Me