JULIE NOVKOV'S HOME PAGE
Associate Professor of Political Science
and Women's Studies

Department of Political Science
University at Albany, SUNY
306 Milne Hall, 135 Western Avenue
Albany, NY 12222

Telephone: 518-442-5279
Fax: 518-442-5298
E-mail: jnovkov_AT_albany.edu.

About Me
I am a faculty member in Albany's Political Science and Women's Studies Departments, where I teach mostly law-related courses, though I also teach courses on race, feminism and women's history in the United States. I moved to UAlbany in the fall of 2006 after spending ten years as an assistant, then associate, professor in the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science.

Research and Organizations
My fairly modest, low-tech research page has samples of my work in progress. Much of the stuff featured here is preliminary and sketchy, so don't hold me to it! Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954 is now available from the University of Michigan Press. I also have some information on the research page about other projects, including two co-edited volumes. Race and American Political Development, published in June 2008 by Routledge, is co-edited with Joe Lowndes at the University of Oregon and Dorian Warren at Columbia University. A second on race, gender, and militarization (co-edited with first editor Barbara Sutton, who's here with me in Albany and Sandi Morgen, recently returned to the University of Oregon, will come out in fall 2008 from Rutgers University Press.

In my legal research, I tend to use Cornell's excellent web site, the Legal Information Institute, for current Supreme Court rulings. For older materials, try USSC Plus, which has good coverage of those obscure old rulings that no one else cares about. The Law and Politics Book Review provides good short reviews of leading books published in the field.

I'm a member of a number of organizations, four of which are the American Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Law and Society Association. APSA is the main disciplinary organization for political scientists. WPSA is a regional association that has a reputation for great theory, courts, and environmental politics panels, and Law and Society draws together scholars from a variety of disciplines to exchange research ideas at our rockin' annual meeting.

Racial Union is in part a political history of prosecutions of mixed-race couples in Alabama for violating laws against interracial intimacy. The Alabama Department of History and Archives has been enormously helpful to me with this project. My other major research has been on women's protective labor legislation and the courts' response to it. For more information, you can check this link to the University of Michigan Press's information about my book, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women. The long and boring version of my CV is also available here.

Studying Politics at Albany
Undergraduates at UAlbany who major in Political Science have a wide variety of opportunities for academic and practical training. See the department's undergraduate program overview. Some unique features of Albany's program are the availability of great internships due to the location in the state's capital, and the Washington Semester Program. I do most of my teaching in the public law field, though at least one of my courses each year cross-lists with Women's Studies. I am also the director of the political science department's Honors Program.

On the graduate level, our graduate field in public law has four faculty members: Associate Professor Scott Barclay, Professor Tom Church, me, and Assistant Professor Udi Sommer, who joined our department this fall. We aim to provide a comprehensive education in public law for political science graduate students, as well as to provide expertise for graduate committees in other areas that touch on law. We are unusual as a group in our breadth of coverage in substantive, methodological, and epistemological terms.

Another area of the Department in which I am involved is the US political development group. Here, we have Assistant Professor Alethia Jones (joint with Public Administration), Professor Bruce Miroff, Assistant Professor Patricia Strach, and me. We also have a faculty History and Politics reading group that regularly incorporates Victor Asal, Cheng Chen, Peter Breiner, and occasionally others with academic interests in these questions.

New graduate fellowships! The Dean of Rockefeller College, Jeffrey Straussman, has recently announced the establishment of the Dean's Scholar Awards for incoming graduate students. These fellowships provide full tuition plus a $16,000 stipend for up to four years of graduate study for Ph.D. students. I'd love to see the Dean award one of these to someone coming in to study public law, so please apply!





Please note: This is a personal web site and any opinions, views or endorsements of any kind
encountered on this page are not the policy of the University at Albany.