Anna Kirkland

Anna Kirkland J.D., Ph.D., is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science, and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008) and co-editor with Jonathan Metzl of Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010). Her new book Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury has recently been published by New York University Press in December 2016. In Vaccine Court, Kirkland explores how activists and government actors come to know, identify, and compensate for vaccine injuries, and what recent debates over vaccine safety reveal about democratic engagement with volatile scientific questions in the contemporary United States. Recent articles include also "Power and Persuasion in the Vaccine Debates: An Analysis of Political Efforts and Outcomes in the States, 1998-2012," "Critical Approaches to Wellness," "Credibility Battles in the Autism Litigation," "The Legitimacy of Vaccine Critics: What's Left after Autism?," and "The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism." Kirkland recently received a National Science Foundation grant to study the organizational handling of rights claims against sex discrimination in health care settings under the Affordable Care Act.