Professor Gregory Mitchell died on Jan. 21 at 46 due to complications from pneumonia. Mitchell was a scholar of sex work, human trafficking, and race, whose work had a particular emphasis on Brazil. At the College, he taught courses such as “Performing Masculinity in Global Popular Culture” and “Race, Sex & Gender in Brazil,” a fall 2025 class that culminated in a Winter Study travel course in Rio de Janeiro. In interviews with the Record, Mitchell’s students, colleagues, and family remembered him as a thoughtful teacher, engaged scholar, and impactful mentor.

Mitchell joined the College in 2012 as the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) program’s first tenure-track hire. In 2018, he became the chair of the department. 

Lucie Schmidt, who chaired the WGSS program when Mitchell was initially hired and is now a professor of economics at Smith College, credited Mitchell with developing the program into its current form. “Greg was intentional about creating a WGSS community,” she wrote in an email to the Record. “He initiated student and faculty events, created a newsletter to reach out to alums… [And] transformed the curriculum with his own course offerings and by co-leading an overhaul of WGSS 101.”

Later, as chair of the WGSS department, Mitchell advocated for the addition of a tenure-track faculty position in trans studies, which the department is currently hiring a candidate to fill in the fall. 

“​​One of my favorite memories was hearing him speak about the importance of a trans studies position,” Emily Swope ’26, a WGSS major, said. Swope took two classes with Mitchell, most recently his fall course on Brazil. “Greg was instrumental in making sure that that position happened… To see it come to fruition after his passing makes that memory pretty special.”

Mitchell’s colleagues recalled his mentorship as a critical support to their own success at the College. “He had a distinctive way of instilling confidence in others,” Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology Christina Simko, a friend of Mitchell’s, wrote in an email to the Record. “It wasn’t just because of what he said; it was also through how he treated people… When we met, during my anxious early years on the tenure track, he immediately started projecting future successes. His faith in me was so palpable that it gave me confidence in those futures, too.”

Assistant Professor of History René Cordero remembered Mitchell’s support for his ambition to incorporate travel into his curriculum. “One of the things I’ve always wanted to do at Williams … is to do a study abroad on the Dominican Republic and Haitian border, and Greg was one of the first people that shared a deluge of documents and so generously gave what he had to me,” he said. “The cherry on top was him inviting me to come along on the trip with him for the Brazil course… Knowing how zealous he was with his students and his course… I felt really proud of that … and it gave me a lot of confidence for when I will do my own trip.”

As a first-generation college graduate, Mitchell’s own experience positioned him to help students from similarly underrepresented backgrounds, according to his partner Nico Amador. “So much of his academic work was about challenging assumptions and using his access to make opportunities for others,” he wrote in an email to the Record.

Schmidt also recalled participating with Mitchell in a Claiming Williams panel discussion composed of first-generation faculty. “Students really appreciated how he opened up about his own life and work, and many were inspired by his example,” she wrote. “He actively worked to try to demystify academia.”

João Sodré, a Brazilian historian who accompanied Mitchell’s students on two of the trips he organized, remembered Mitchell’s mentorship as instrumental in his pursuit of graduate study in the United States. “As someone coming from abroad, everything was new to me … and knowing that he went through that as well, in a different context, it makes sense that he was really interested in guiding [me] through that process,” Sodré said.

Mitchell similarly nurtured the talents of his students at the College, Swope said. “He was really excited to get to know you and what your interests were,” she said. For her final paper in “Race, Sex & Gender in Brazil,” Swope wrote a literary paper that fell outside Mitchell’s area of specialization, but she recalled his eagerness to engage with her project. “He really wanted to help us develop our personal projects and the things that we were passionate about,” she said.

The culture and politics of sexuality in Brazil was a throughline of Mithcell’s scholarly work and teaching. His first book, Tourist Attractions: Performing Masculinity & Race in Brazil’s Sexual Economy, studied male sex workers in Brazil. Mitchell’s subsequent published work probed the relationship between sporting events and sex work. “Greg had this remarkable ability to revel in the beauty of the world while also seeing its injustices clearly,” Simko wrote.

Beyond his academic engagement with sexuality in Brazil, Mitchell acted as an expert witness in asylum cases to help Brazilians fleeing homophobic violence settle in the United States. In each of the seven cases he testified in, the applicants were granted asylum.

According to Sodré, Mitchell’s study of Brazil was grounded in a love for its people and culture. “Some people, when they do research on a country, see it as a job… but Greg had a good time,” he said. “He was still really interested in going to restaurants, seeing people, attending music events, and going to nature sites.”

Mitchell was especially eager to share his love for Brazil with students. “He brought a bunch of t-shirts [to class] that he had from Brazil from this sex workers’ rights organization,” Swope recalled. “And he would pass them around the circle and explain all of the Portuguese inside jokes and wordplay, and then the memories he had of the people who gave him the shirts and the connections he had made there.”

Mitchell organized three travel courses to Brazil, supported by the Class of 1962 Global Initiatives Ventures Fund. Due to his illness, he was unable to join the most recent trip in January. Nonetheless, he insisted that the class visit Ilha Grande, an island near Rio de Janeiro that Swope said was one of his favorite places. “It has beautiful beaches and waterfalls, and he really wanted students to experience that,” Sodré said.

Amador said that Mitchell felt fortunate for the opportunities his work provided him. “He told me that every time he was in a new place, he felt as though he was watching himself through the eyes of the kid from [Ottawa, Ill.,] who would have never imagined he’d be standing on the beaches of Rio or walking the streets of Istanbul or visiting ancient ruins in Greece,” he wrote in an email to the Record.