Dr. Terza A. Lima-Neves is working with colleagues to launch a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.Photo courtesy of Terza A. Lima-Neves
She describes the YouTube channel as a passion project that dives into the different areas of her life as an academic, mother, researcher and person who has dealt with mental health challenges, particularly while navigating the early phases of the pandemic. Lima-Neves says she’s keeping it real, openly speaking about how chaotic life can be despite its many rewards.
“There’s no such thing as balance; it’s more like a juggling act. I try to be very intentional in sharing how I set boundaries and stick to them around my time and the projects that I’m involved in,” says Lima-Neves, who is mother to daughter Max, 11, and son Emilio, 9. She is thankful that she and husband Luis Neves share family and domestic duties.
The pressures to publish and achieve tenure and promotion are real. It took her a while to acknowledge her struggles and needs, but over the past few years she’s become more adept at making it work. She feels it’s important to share her stories with women — in and out of academia — and build community with other scholars.
“One of the goals I’m trying to achieve is to portray our lives outside of the classroom to humanize our experience and to show that many of our contributions actually happen outside of the classroom in the research that we do, in the work that we publish and the work that we do with students,” she says.
Lima-Neves is a professor of political science at Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU, an HBCU institution) in Charlotte, N.C. Even though there are very few Black female full professors in the academy, Lima-Neves says that was always her goal. Over the course of her career, she has built a community of Black women professionals who are supportive and provide inspiration. Also, taking care of one’s mental health is important and prioritizing one’s time when it comes to things like committee work.
“Getting to full professor for me was a bigger goal than getting tenure and being promoted to associate professor,” says Lima-Neves. “I was working towards tenure, but the final prize was the full professor because I had met Jewel Prestage, who was the first Black woman to have a PhD in political science, at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (Dr. Prestage, who taught at Southern University and was a renowned researcher, passed away in 2020).
