2026 Sex, Gender, Sexuality Studies Symposium Lecture by Felicia Kornbluh, Ph.D 

It has been over ten years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that U.S. states and localities cannot deny citizens access to marriage on the basis of their sex or sexuality. Kornbluh will discuss the road to the Obergefell decision of 2015 and the road away from it and to our own dilemmas. Her focus is the case of Sharon Kowalski, who became disabled after her car was hit by a drunk driver. Kowalski's lover, Sharon Thompson, worked with public-interest advocates and activists in the lesbian-feminist, disability, and gay liberation movements to turn her partner's struggles into a national cause celebre. Together, these forgotten activists rewrote the U.S. constitution from the ground up. But they left parts of the work undone. Kornbluh's lecture will chronicle forgotten chapters of the struggle for same-sex marriage rights. And she will gather pieces of the LGBT+, disability, and health-care agenda that were left on the editing-room floor by activists from the 1980s through the early 2000s.  

Felicia Kornbluh (she/they) is an historian of 20^th and 21^st-century U.S. politics. She is a Professor of History, Director of Jewish Studies, and affiliated faculty member in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Law and Society at the University of Vermont.  She has authored or coauthored dozens of articles and three books, most recently the award-winning A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove Press, 2023).  Kornbluh co-edited (with Marie-Amélie George) “Queer U.S. Constitutional History,” a 5-essay symposium in the Journal of American Constitutional History and was primary author of the symposium introduction.  With George, they also organized a conference on Queer Legal History and are currently at work on an edited collection on the same subject. 

In 2025-26, Kornbluh is the sole holder of the Martin Duberman Fellowship in LGBTQ+ history at the New York Public Library, where they are researching the pre-history of modern LGBTQ+ rights, from the standpoint of the nearly forgotten cause célèbre from the 1980s and early 1990s over the legal case In re Guardianship of Sharon Kowalski. 

Kornbluh writes a Substack newsletter titled “History Teaches . . . ,” which brings historical knowledge into dialogue with contemporary politics, and publishes regularly for Ms.com and The American Prospect, and diverse journals including The New York Review of Books, Journal of American History, Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, Atlantic, Time.com, and The Forward.  She chairs the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund and the Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History.