Julie Novkov 

I am the Interim Dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy and a Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. I arrived in 2006 after spending ten years on the faculty at the University of Oregon. My research and teaching are situated at the intersection of law, history, US political development, and subordinated identity. I study law as both a system of political and social control and as a site for reform through activists’ pressure. I am particularly interested in the way that the law defines and translates categories associated with identity, such as race and gender, and the ways that these categories transform and are transformed by legal discourse.