Julie Novkov

Julie Novkov is the Dean of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, a Collins Fellow, and Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. Serving as Dean since 2023, she has been a faculty member at UAlbany since 2006. Her research and teaching address law, history, US political development and subordinated identity. She views law as both a system of political and social control and as a site for reform through activists’ pressure. She is particularly interested in the way that the law defines and translates categories associated with identity, such as race and gender, and the ways that these categories transform and are transformed by legal discourse.

Dean Novkov is the author of several books and co-edited volumes, most recently coauthoring with Carol Nackenoff American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship (University Press of Kansas 2022). Her Racial Union (University of Michigan Press 2008) was the co-recipient of the American Political Science Association’s 2009 Ralph Bunche Award for the best scholarly work in political science which explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism. This book argues that the criminal regulation of interracial intimacy played a pivotal role in shaping and reflecting the development of white supremacy in Alabama between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights Era. Her first book, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women (University of Michigan Press 2001), addressed gender and constitutional development, rereading through the lens of gender the history of the courts' unwillingness to accept protective legislation for workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She and Carol Nackenoff co-edited Stating the Family (University Press of Kansas 2020) and Statebuilding from the Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), and she also co-edited Race and American Political Development (with Joseph Lowndes and Dorian Warren, Routledge Press in 2008), and Security Disarmed (with UAlbany professor Barbara Sutton and Sandra Morgen, Rutgers University Press 2008). She has also published many articles and book chapters.

Dean Novkov served as a co-editor American Political Science Review from 2020 through 2024 and is now a co-editor of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society Series at the University Press of Kansas. She chaired the Political Science Department from 2011-2017 and was President of the Western Political Science Association from 2016-2017. In the American Political Science Association, she served on the Executive Council, presided over the Law and Courts as well as the Sexuality and Politics Section, and chaired the LGBT Status Committee. She has also served extensively in the Western Political Science Association, other scholarly organizations, and on editorial boards for several journals. She enjoys sharing her expertise in the public sphere and has written for the Washington Post, The Conversation, and several other news outlets.

Dean Novkov's personal website