Her hobby is a little different. Hardesty also runs marathons — and she qualified for the recent 2020 Olympic trials.

Hardesty’s latest paper, published in the Johns Hopkins University Press, began when she noticed articles criticizing women who participated in an online trend of political selfies. Women in the photos would hold up a sign or whiteboard with phrases such as “I don’t need feminism because…” or “Why I don’t need feminism:” and Hardesty wanted to understand the reason for the photos in the first place.

Hardesty found these photos responded to a Duke University project where students were asked to complete the phrase “I need feminism because…” on a whiteboard. The photo series was shared widely online, but the photos in the “anti-feminist” category ultimately received more attention.

Political selfies in the digital age raise some unique challenges. It’s difficult to identify if the photo was staged, for instance, and sometimes it’s unclear whether the subject in the photograph is the person who is originating the statement.

“I think I can say pretty confidently, in part because of the way people react to photos, that people see pictures as being a snapshot of something that’s real,” Hardesty says.

Hardesty’s paper, titled Political Selfies and the Paradox of Giving Voice to Virtual Bodies, also addresses the idea that social media enables images to travel much further than messages can spread in person. We as individuals can publicly display our relation to wider, less specific political movements. Newer technology, including filters and photo editing apps, can also change our perception as well as our relationship with our own bodies.

“It’s interesting to consider how people can inhabit a digital mock-up of themselves,” says Hardesty, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2016. “What does it mean to be an embodied human when people are having so many more interactions not in their flesh and blood bodies?”

Yvonne Smith, now an assistant professor at Syracuse University, was a doctoral student with Hardesty. She saw her dedication to integrating her research into her daily life. “I admire Melissa’s commitment to examining how feminisms play out in everyday practices — like political selfies or foster parenting,” Smith says. “I think her research puts feminist thought to work making sense of phenomena that are central to our profession.”

While Hardesty’s academic projects can take several years, marathons move faster: 2 hours, 44 minutes and 10 seconds to be exact. Completing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in that time made her eligible to try out for the 2020 Olympics.

“I have no shot of making the Olympic team,” Hardesty said with a laugh before the trials, which were held Feb. 29 in Atlanta.

The trials were granted gold status by USA Track and Field; the top three runners from the men’s and women’s categories will go on to Tokyo in 2020.

Hardesty finished 191st out of the 390 women who completed the race, and 361st overall, out 565 runners. She finished in the top 60th percentile, with a time of 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 31 seconds — less than five minutes more than her qualifying time.

Hardesty began running in 2006 for recreational purposes, but she grew more serious about it as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. She has been competing since 2008.

She describes her best races as the ones where she begins the race feeling less than ready but reaches a peak around the 20th mile — just when others may begin to fall in their speed. Her efficient use of energy to maintain a strong pace throughout a race is an essential trait among successful marathon runners.

When the weather gets below 20 degrees, or road conditions are too icy, Hardesty trains indoors on a treadmill. She sticks to a cycle of training, resting between marathons, and then slowly working her way back to a competitive level in the weeks before a race.

If you ask Alana Gunn, an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, Hardesty has always had the dedication of an Olympian.

“She qualified for the Olympic trials one week and got an awesome paper accepted the next!” Gunn says. “That still stands out to me — her ability to support others while also exploring her own diverse talents and ambitions.”

“I asked myself how and why it is that we think of so many sexual issues in terms of rights,” says Wheeler, now an associate professor of history at Binghamton University and co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History.

The answer can be traced back to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its fight to protect freedom of speech.

In her latest book, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2012), Wheeler looks at how the ACLU, openly or behind the scenes, fought for birth-control advocates and nudists, and took on the controversial issues of obscenity, abortion, prostitution, involuntary sterilization, rape and sexual harassment throughout the 20th century.

Wheeler hopes that readership isn’t limited to historians and academics, because legal battles over abortion and gay marriage continue to be passionately debated, from courtrooms to cocktail parties. That makes it important for citizens to understand how such battles have been fought and won for rights that some of us may take for granted, such as birth control.

Today, birth control is legal and widely available. But in the 1920s, federal obscenity laws banned the exchange of birth-control information in the U.S. mail and in public venues, and some states made it a crime to sell or advertise birth-control products. Connecticut even made it illegal to use birth control, Wheeler says.

The ACLU’s foray into battles to make birth control and information about it legal began shortly after the organization was founded in 1920.

Over time, the assumption of sexual rights and sexual expression has become a part of everyday life, Wheeler says. “Phrases such as ‘informed consent,’ ‘reproductive freedom’ and ‘the right to privacy’ roll easily off the tongues of many if not most American adults today, conservatives as well as liberals.”

In an early review, Susan Brownmiller, author of the landmark book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, calls Wheeler’s new book a meticulous account of the ACLU’s struggle to embrace new approaches in law while remaining faithful to its original mission of championing free speech.

“This is a thoughtful book for thoughtful people in a democracy where rights and liberties often collide,” Brownmiller writes.