Speakers
With a coalition of anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, and Christian right groups now openly calling for the next conservative president to enforce the Comstock Act as a nationwide abortion ban, we must imagine a post-Comstock future.
ComstockCon has invited organizers, historians, attorneys, journalists, artists, writers, and others to trace the connections between the political context in which the Comstock Act was passed and how it constrains our present.
Our speakers are experts on the many targets of the Comstock Act, from abortion and contraception to obscenity and free speech. They bring together feminist, queer, and reproductive justice analyses, and we’re honored they’re joining us.
Renee Bracey Sherman
Renee Bracey Sherman is a reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, and writer. She is the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions and share their stories at the intersection of race, class, and gender identity. She is also an executive producer of Ours to Tell, an award-winning documentary elevating the voices of people who’ve had abortions, co-host of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, a podcast from The Meteor, and the co-author of the forthcoming book LIBERATING ABORTION: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us from Amistad/HarperCollins.
Khiara M. Bridges
Khiara M. Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She has written many articles concerning race, class, reproductive rights, and the intersection of the three. Her scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. She is also the author of three books: Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). She is a coeditor of a reproductive justice book series that is published under the imprint of the University of California Press. She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School and her Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. She speaks fluent Spanish and basic Arabic, and she is a classically trained ballet dancer.
Nancy Cárdenas Peña
Nancy was born and raised in the Texas border community of the Rio Grande Valley. Nancy recently worked as the Texas Director of Policy and Advocacy at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice where she worked at the intersection of immigration and abortion care. Nancy organized against the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, state sanctioned violence through militarization, and worked on immigrant deportation defense cases. Nancy also served on the board of Reproaction advising on collective direct actions and Frontera Fund an abortion fund in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Nancy is part of We Testify, an organization of abortion storytellers breaking stigma around self managed abortion and brings that experience as the current director of the Abortion on Our Own Terms Campaign.
Gillian Frank
Gillian Frank is a historian of sexuality and religion and a lecturer at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also a visiting affiliate fellow at Princeton University's Center for Culture, Society and Religion. Frank is the author of numerous academic articles on the histories of sexuality, gender and religion (which have appeared in venues like the Journal of the History of Sexuality, American Jewish History, and Gender and History) and public facing scholarship (with bylines in publications including The Washington Post, Time, Jezebel and Slate). He is co-editor of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States (UNC Press: 2018). Frank is currently at work on a manuscript called A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade (forthcoming UNC Press). You can listen to his podcast Sexing History, which explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present, wherever you stream your shows.
Andrea Friedman
Andrea Friedman is Professor Emeritx of History and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality and politics in the twentieth century United States. She has published two books, Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent and Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945. She is also founder and co-director of Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis, a historical GIS map that documents and analyzes multiple axes of urban segregation through a focus on the LGBTQ+ experience in the St. Louis metro region.
She’s now happily living in New Mexico and beginning a new career as a freelance academic developmental editor.
Jules Gill-Peterson
Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) and A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024).
Andrea Grimes
Andrea Grimes is a Texan writer, communications strategist, and activist who has been covering and supporting the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements for over 15 years. Her reporting, news analyses, and op-eds have have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, MSNBC, the Columbia Journalism Review, DAME, Rewire News, the Texas Observer and dozens of other publications, and she holds a master's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas. Her newsletter, Home With The Armadillo, features a weekly abortion news roundup and dispatches on feminism, media criticism, and politics from the heart of the Lone Star state. She lives in Austin with her husband, two cats, and a hyperactive hound dog.
Jennifer Kinsley
Jennifer Kinsley is a judge on the Ohio First District Court of Appeals and a member of the tenured faculty at NKU Chase College of Law. A graduate of the Duke University School of Law, she was elected to the court in 2022 after a long career practicing and teaching in the areas of free speech law and criminal legal reform. As an attorney and scholar, Judge Kinsley developed a national reputation as a First Amendment advocate, defending dozens of obscenity trials and serving as the president of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. Judge Kinsley’s work has been the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and Kim Kardashian’s The Justice Project documentary on the Oxygen Network, and her scholarship has been published in the Emory Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, and others. She has spoken around the world, including to judges in Turkey and lawyers in Russia, on free speech topics.
Amy Littlefield
Amy Littlefield is the abortion access correspondent for The Nation and a freelance journalist who has covered reproductive health care for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is at work on a book about how we lost Roe v. Wade.
Adri Pérez
Adri Pérez is an organizer, disruptor, and educator with over eight years of civic engagement, reproductive justice, LGBTQIA+ community organizing, and policy justice experience in Texas. They are currently the Generation Rising Manager for Seed The Vote, and they focus on building youth power in swing states across the country for the 2024 election. Prior to joining Seed The Vote, Adri was the Organizing Director at Texas Freedom Network and LGBTQIA+ work at the ACLU of Texas, where they advocated for the civil rights and dignity of transgender people, transgender kids, and all those who love and support them.
As a queer, transgender, non-binary, and first-generation immigrant, Adri’s intersectional experience fuels their passion for strategy building across multiple issue areas. In 2013, Adri co-founded West Fund, the first abortion fund in West Texas. After finding a passion for redistributing wealth, in 2018, they also co-founded the Fronterizx Fianza Fund, a grassroots organization that raises money to free detained asylum seekers.
Rachel Rebouché
Rachel Rebouché is the Dean and Peter J. Liacouras Professor of Law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law. She is a Faculty Fellow at Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research and a member of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Dean Rebouché is a leading scholar in family law, public health, and reproductive health law. She is the author or editor of seven books, the author of dozens of articles in law reviews and peer edited journals, and a frequent contributor to national publications and media outlets in her areas of expertise.
Laurie Bertram Roberts
Laurie Bertram Roberts (she/they) is a low income, black, queer, disabled grassroots reproductive justice activist, freelance writer, doula, aspiring midwife, and mother. She is the co-founder and current Executive Director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, Mississippi's only reproductive justice organization that provides direct funding and practical support for abortion access, emergency contraception, birth control, community-based sex education, parenting, and no strings/stigma pregnancy support regardless of pregnancy outcome.
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of early-twentieth-century law, medicine, and women’s health. She is an Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University with joint appointments in the departments of History and Interdisciplinary Studies and serves as the faculty research fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. Her book, Rivals and Rights: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement is under contract with Rutgers University Press.
Amy Werbel
Amy Werbel is Professor of the History of Art at the State University of New York-Fashion Institute of Technology. For the past twenty years, her research has concentrated on censorship at the intersections of law and culture, and particularly in relation to freedom of artistic and sexual expression. Her most recent book is Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (Columbia University Press, 2018). Professor Werbel has lectured nationally and internationally on the damaging impact of censorship not only on artistic expression but also on pluralism and democracy more generally, including during two appointments as a Fulbright Scholar to China (2011-2012) and to the United Kingdom (2019-2020).
Mary Ziegler
Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Professor of Law at the University of California Davis and one of the world’s leading legal historians of the abortion debate in the United States. The award-winning author of six books on social movement struggles around reproduction, she has published books with Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale University Presses, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the New York University Law Review, and the Michigan Law Review. She is on the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History and is one of a select group of historians advising the Smithsonian on the creation of its American Women’s History Museum. Her new project, a history of struggles over fetal personhood which is forthcoming with Yale University Press, won her a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2023-2024.