Professor Felicia Kornbluh (she/they) specializes in the histories of feminism, gender, social welfare, disability, law, Jews in the United States, and reproductive politics. They are Professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and affiliated faculty in Jewish Studies - and the author or coauthor of three books, including the New York Times – reviewed A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove Press, 2023). Their current projects are Sex. Gender. Tyranny., a historical and feminist study of the relationship between attempted controls on gender and sexuality, and anti-democratic movements or regimes, and Sharon and Karen: A Love Story, a study of the legal case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson, a forgotten but pivotal moment in the histories of gay and disability rights, and in the increasing recognition of same-sex marriages in the 1980s through the early 2000s.
Kornbluh writes regularly for the scholarly and popular press, including for Feminist Studies, The Journal of American History, American Prospect, Washington Post, New York Review of Books, and The Forward, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, Princeton University, the University of California-Berkeley Law School, and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill. A recipient of grants from the American Historical Association, Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), they also serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of American Constitutional History, and the journals The 1960s and Moving the Social: A Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements.
Kornbluh is a former member of the Vermont Commission on Women and the Board of Trustees of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, as well as President of United Academics, the University of Vermont faculty union (AFT/AAUP). They serve at present as vice president of the board of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund and a College of Arts and Sciences Delegate to United Academics.
Kornbluh lives in Williston with their partner of 30 years and two black cats.
