An Evening with Katherine Franke
Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law (retired) at Columbia University, where she served on the law faculty for 25 years, and where she also founded and directed the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. She served on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She also led a research team that documented Columbia Law School’s relationship to slavery and its legacies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality, race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Her first book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. Her second book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition (Haymarket Press 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.
Professor Franke serves on the Advisory Board of Palestine Legal, the steering committee of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, the editorial board of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and on the Advisory Board of Columbia University’s Center for Justice. Prior to 2018, before she was permanently banned from entering the state of Israel, she served as an academic mentor for the human rights faculty at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem.
Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition
"With eloquence, skill, and an unstinting eye on justice, the second updated edition of legal scholar Katherine Franke's Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, is as powerful as it is timely. Focused on the Sea Islands of South Carolina where the promise of land after emancipation began, Franke confronts the "original sin from which the evil of structural racism has grown...". She turns to the voices of Black enslaved people themselves to make the case that the value of their labor and lives were stolen, and a debt is owed. She then imagines alternate futures, and maps a path toward reparations, not to feign some type of artificial closure, but to approximate some modicum of justice. This is a must-read book for organizers and historians alike." --Barbara Ransby
