Mayra Rivera joined the HDS faculty in July 2010, having previously been Assistant Professor of Theology at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. She also mentored doctoral students of the Graduate Theological Union. Her transdisciplinary work in critical theological studies engages key Christian themes in relation to current theory and philosopy Rivera's work also analyzes the role of religious ideas in Latina theory and literature. Her book The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (2007) explores the relationship between models of divine otherness and ideas about interhuman difference. She is also co-editor, with Stephen Moore, of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (2010) and, with Catherine Keller and Michael Nausner, of Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004). She is currently writing a book that explores the connections between theological and philosophical metaphors of body and flesh.