About

Paula M. L. Moya is the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and a professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Cornell University and a B.A. from the University of Houston. Moya is currently the Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she is on leave for the academic year 2025-2026. Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies. She has authored books including 'The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism' and 'Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles,' and has co-edited collections of essays on race, identity politics, and postmodernism. Moya has served in various leadership roles at Stanford, including Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Director of the Research Institute of CCSRE, Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature, Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been involved in numerous research networks and projects, including the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project and the Perfecto Project, a fitness app integrating narrative and social psychology to promote healthier behaviors in Latinx populations. Her fellowships include the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Clayman Institute, and the Ford Foundation, among others. She has received awards such as the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Programming language
• Data science
• Economics
• Public relations
• Art
• Nursing
• Human–computer interaction
• Finance
• Internet privacy
• Business
• Economy
• Literature
• Medicine

Selected publications

• A Digital Mindset Intervention to Improve Pain and Exercise Participation in Individuals With Knee Osteoarthritis: A Randomized Clinical Trial

  Osteoarthritis and Cartilage · 2024-04-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Some Propositions on Close Reading

  symplokē · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A randomized clinical trial testing digital mindset intervention for knee osteoarthritis pain and activity improvement

  npj Digital Medicine · 2024-10-17 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  This randomized clinical trial evaluated the effectiveness of short, digital interventions in improving physical activity and pain for individuals with knee osteoarthritis. We compared a digital mindset intervention, focusing on adaptive mindsets (e.g., osteoarthritis is manageable), to a digital education intervention and a no-intervention group. 408 participants with knee osteoarthritis completed the study online in the US. The mindset intervention significantly improved mindsets compared to both other groups (P < 0.001) and increased physical activity levels more than the no-intervention group (mean = 28.6 points, P = 0.001), but pain reduction was not significant. The mindset group also showed significantly greater improvements in the perceived need for surgery, self-imposed physical limitations, fear of movement, and self-efficacy than the no-intervention and education groups. This trial demonstrates the effectiveness of brief digital interventions in educating about osteoarthritis and further highlights the additional benefits of improving mindsets to transform patients' approach to disease management. The study was prospectively registered (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT05698368, 2023-01-26).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Narrative-Based Visual Feedback to Encourage Sustained Physical Activity

  Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies · 2023-03-27 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  Stories are a core way human beings make meaning and sense of the world and our lived experiences, including our behaviors, desires, and goals. Narrative structures, both visual and textual, help us understand and act on information, while also evoking strong emotions. Focusing on the health context, this research examines the effectiveness of narrative-based feedback in motivating physical activity behaviors and underlying attitudes over longitudinal periods. After collecting two weeks of baseline physical activity levels, N=39 participants installed our smartphone application, WhoIsZuki. The WhoIsZuki app supports goal setting and semi-automated activity tracking, and it provides an ambient display that visually encodes these tracked activities as well as progress toward goals. Half of participants received a version of the interface that supplied behavioral feedback in the form of a multi-chapter episodic narrative, while the other half received a control condition version that provided an aesthetically-similar visualization but without any characterization, episodic structure, dramatic effect, or other narrative elements. After interacting with these versions for four months, our analysis showed that participants receiving the multi-chapter narrative feedback performed more physical activity, achieved more goals, experienced more positive psychological shifts, and overall engaged more meaningfully with the digital intervention.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures

  The Ohio State University Press eBooks · 2023 · 14 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  Three anonymous reviewers of an unsuccessful research initiative on historical North American city scripts directed by Barbara Buchenau provided useful feedback.This

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Decolonial Virtues of Ethnospeculative Fiction

  2022-06-22 · 10 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Proposing that there is no account of an apocalypse that is not also an argument—albeit a negative one—for how the world should be organized, this chapter turns to apocalyptic, postapocalyptic, and dystopian speculative fiction to discuss its ethical potential in the classroom. Introducing “ethnospeculation” as one of the most significant modes through which authors, readers, teachers, and students communicate with each other, the authors highlight the way critical practices of reading and writing developed by literary critics in the academy can cultivate virtue in the service of promoting justice. Drawing on literary works from several different ethnic communities, they argue that such comparative study contributes to a repository of wide-ranging practices and behaviors that constitute what can be considered “virtuous” or “good” in different societies. In this way, ethnospeculative fiction provides an invaluable space within which to examine ethical certainties and explore fundamental values.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘‘Racism is not intellectual’’: Interracial Friendship, Multicultural Literature, and Decolonizing Epistemologies

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-03-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• De-forming and Re-making

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-05-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This essay describes Bernardine Evaristo as exemplary of a cohort of contemporary writers who are self-consciously pushing the boundaries of content and form to amplify the voices and perspectives of marginalized persons. Laying out in a systematic way the features and goals of the multifocal decolonial novel, this article takes Evaristo’s Booker Prize–winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a case study. We show that Evaristo uses a multifocal narrrative structure to distribute narrative attention and character space more or less equally among a large number of characters, even as she pays careful attention to the characters’ networks of interaction and affiliation. Such a narrative structure demonstrates that there are always multiple “worlds of sense” – or domains of intelligibility – that make up a shared social-natural world; they further effectively illustrate the ecological and interconnected nature of that world. In this way, multifocal narrative novels provincialize the so-called universal perspective without falling into epistemological or ontological relativism. Through the use of a multifocal narrative structure and the poetic technique of caesura, Evaristo deploys the resources of literary fiction to document an obscured Black British historical past while harnessing the imagination to reshape an understanding of that past.

  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging Mobile Technology for Public Health Promotion: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

  Annual Review of Public Health · 2022 · 33 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology

  Health behaviors are inextricably linked to health and well-being, yet issues such as physical inactivity and insufficient sleep remain significant global public health problems. Mobile technology-and the unprecedented scope and quantity of data it generates-has a promising but largely untapped potential to promote health behaviors at the individual and population levels. This perspective article provides multidisciplinary recommendations on the design and use of mobile technology, and the concomitant wealth of data, to promote behaviors that support overall health. Using physical activity as anexemplar health behavior, we review emerging strategies for health behavior change interventions. We describe progress on personalizing interventions to an individual and their social, cultural, and built environments, as well as on evaluating relationships between mobile technology data and health to establish evidence-based guidelines. In reviewing these strategies and highlighting directions for future research, we advance the use of theory-based, personalized, and human-centered approaches in promoting health behaviors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ask a Feminist: Eesha Pandit and Paula Moya Discuss Activism and the Academy with Carla Kaplan and Suzanna Walters

  Signs · 2021-09-01

  article

  The latest installment of Ask a Feminist features nonprofit leader and activist Eesha Pandit and feminist scholar Paula Moya—in conversation with one another and with Signs editor Suzanna Walters and board chair Carla Kaplan—on feminist activism and scholarship, on accountability, coalition, and collaboration.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Scott L. Delp

  Stanford University

  6 shared

• Alia J. Crum

  Stanford University

  6 shared

• Disha Ghandwani

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Trevor Hastie

  5 shared

• Kris Evans

  Palo Alto University

  4 shared

• Melissa Boswell

  Palo Alto University

  4 shared

• Nicholas J. Giori

  Stanford Medicine

  3 shared

• Sean R. Zion

  3 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Awards & honors

• Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow at the Stanford Humanit…
• fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sc…
• Clayman Institute Fellow
• CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow
• Ford Foundation posdoctoral fellow