Dr. Maria Elisa Christie
Program Director, Women in International Development
Phone: (540) 231-4297
E-mail: mechristie@vt.edu
Expertise: Gender Equity
Education: B.A., International Studies, History, and Romance Languages, University of Oregon, 1983; M.A., Spanish and Women’s Studies, University of Oregon, 1994; Ph.D., Geography, University of Texas at Austin, 2003.
Languages: English, French, Spanish
Countries of work experience: Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Philippines, Republic of Guinea, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda, Vietnam
Experience Summary: Dr. Christie has more than 20 years of experience in international development. Throughout her career, she has worked with a variety of development, research, and non-governmental agencies around the developing world along with local, state, and federal governments in the United States and Mexico.
Dr. Christie has played a key role in launching new projects that support international collaboration. For example, she helped start the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) for the Institute for Food and Development Policy (now known as Food First). Dr. Christie organized the group’s first meeting, which brought bring together farm workers, environmentalists, and consumer groups from across Latin America. In the Caribbean and Central America, Dr. Christie worked with INIES/CRIES, a network of social and economic research institutions, to obtain funding for collaborative research, manage relations with donors and international organizations, and organize conferences and public relations.
Dr. Christie’s research focuses on gendered spaces and everyday life in nature/society relations, participatory research methodologies, kitchens and gardens, and women’s reciprocity networks. She has published a book, Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico, with the University of Texas Press. Her other publications include an article in The Geographical Review’s special issue on gardens, for which she was a guest editor, as well as an article on gendered territory in Gender, Place, and Culture.
As the Program Director for Women in International Development (WID), Dr. Christie’s role is to provide leadership within OIRED to ensure that all projects and programs are gender sensitive and will have a positive effect on the most disadvantaged beneficiaries, many of whom are women. Dr. Christie also works with the faculty and staff at Virginia Tech to increase their capacity to effectively address gender issues in international research and grant proposals. She serves as a gender equity specialist on the SANREM and IPM CRSPs, which are managed by OIRED, and is also a principal investigator for the Peanut CRSP that is managed by the University of Georgia.
