Anna Kirkland
Anna Kirkland is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. She received her law degree (2001) and Ph.D in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (2003) from the University of California, Berkeley. She holds courtesy appointments with the Law School, Sociology, Political Science, and Health Management and Policy at Michigan. Prof. Kirkland is a member of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation and served as a committee member on the National Academies panel charged with studying sexual harassment in the STEM fields of academia. From 2017 to 2022 she directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, a unit of the UM Office of Research.
Prof. Kirkland’s third book, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients, is recently published by the University of California Press. It is available in paperpack and free open access on the UC Press Luminos platform. Discrimination law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the U.S. But using civil rights law in healthcare settings is difficult because our healthcare system is complex, fragmented, and tuned to other priorities. The troubles with civil rights in health care reveal deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments. Prof. Kirkland explains what health care civil rights are, how they are supposed to work to protect against discrimination based on gender identity, how they work in practice at all levels, and how to strengthen them. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and open access was made possible by a TOME publishing grant (UM Library, LSA, and OVPR).
Prof. Kirkland’s latest research (co-PI with Dr. Jim Dupree, Michigan Medicine Urology) is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study how insurance benefit designs for IVF influence the decisions patients make during IVF and the outcomes of their IVF attempts.
Prof. Kirkland is a co-editor with stef shuster and Carla Pfeffer of the Social Science and Medicine Special Issue “Unequal Care: Trans Medicine and Health in Dangerous Times” (October 2024). She is the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008) and Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (New York University Press, 2016), co-editor with Jonathan Metzl of Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010), and co-editor with with Prof. Marie-Andree Jacob at the University of Leeds, UK of a Research Handbook on Sociolegal Studies of Medicine and Health (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020).
She is currently a co-PI with Professor Gary Harper (School of Public Health) on a five year R25 training grant from the National Institute of Mental Health called “Pipeline to Graduate Education and Careers in Behavioral and Social Science Research for URM Undergraduates: Addressing HIV in Sexual and Gender Minority Communities” that created Student Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research (SOAR) and PI for “Pregnancy and Postpartum Support Programs for Women in Prison: Maternal and Neonatal Outcomes,” an NIH subaward with the University of Minnesota.
Prof. Kirkland teaches courses on health discrimination at the law school and gender and the law and health policy in Women's and Gender Studies.