Dr. Laura Briggs

DR. LAURA BRIGGS (WAM Scholar-In-Residence) has been writing and teaching about reproductive politics for twenty years. Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dr. Brigg’s most recent book titled Taking Children: A History of American Terror is on children in immigration detention or otherwise separated from their parents by the state. Although much of her work might be said to be on the pro-natalist side of thinking about reproductive justice–that is, how we enable the children we have to survive and thrive–she have been teaching and advising on the politics of how people prevent pregnancies and births they cannot sustain or do not want as well, including the history and politics of birth control and abortion. Dr. Briggs is the author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (University of California Press, 2016); Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption (Duke, 2012), winner of the James A. Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians (History of U.S. Race Relations); Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (American Crossroads Series, University of California Press, 2002); and co-editor with Diana Marre of International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children (NYU Press, 2009). She has written more than three dozen articles and book chapters; some of my recent publications have been in Adoption and Culture; American Quarterly; Feminist Studies; Scholar and the Feminist Online; American Indian Quarterly; Scripta Nova (Barcelona). She is a member of the editorial committee of the American Crossroads and Reproductive Justice series at UC Pres. She has held fellowships and residencies at the University of Michigan, University of Utah, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Harvard University. She has been part of the organizing collectives of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History and the Thinking Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute. My education includes a Ph.D. from Brown University, American Studies, 1998, and a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School.

Roe Creative Team