Annie Menzel
Position title: Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies
Email: acmenzel@wisc.edu
Address:
3416 Sterling Hall
Photo credit: Smoketree Photography
B.A. University of Texas; M.A., Ph.D. University of Washington.
Welcome to my page! I am a political theorist and former midwife, and my work focuses on understanding how white supremacy, colonization, and gender-based oppression shape human reproductive life, health, and care—as well as theorizations and praxes of reproductive justice and freedom. My research and teaching foreground race, gender, and reproductive politics and practices in North America; Black political thought, especially Black feminisms; feminist political theory and queer theory; abolitionist and anti-colonial theory and praxis; biopolitics; and feminist science and technology studies of reproductive health and medicine.
My first book, Fatal Denial: Racism and The Political Life of Black Infant Mortality, will be published in May 2024 by the University of California Press, in their Reproductive Justice Series. I am also at work on a second book project, Birthing Paradox: Race, Colonization, and Radicalism in US Midwifery, which seeks to understand the contradictory and practices in the homebirth midwifery movement since 1970.
I have published work in the Du Bois Review, Contemporary Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, Signs, The Boston Review, and Theory and Event.