Laura Harrison, Professor | Department Chair

Profile

Laura Harrison received her doctorate in Gender Studies from Indiana University. Her most recent book project, Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety (NYU Press, 2022) takes on socially constructed beliefs about infant safety, including how medicine, law, and policy reward some parents while punishing others. Her first book, Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-racial Surrogacy (NYU Press, 2016) examines the implications of surrogacy arrangements for contemporary understandings of race, kinship, and gender. Professor Harrison’s work on subjects ranging from reproductive justice, surrogacy, representations of motherhood, race and public health, and gender and feminist backlash appears in journals including Signs, Frontiers, Feminist Formations, Genders, Feminist Media Studies, and Women’s Studies International Forum. Her writing on the infant formula shortage, Josh Duggar and feminist backlash, and pregnancy monitoring technology can be found in the Washington Post, and her writing on product safety as a feminist issue appears in Ms. Magazine. Professor Harrison is committed to increasing access to and quality of prison education in Minnesota, and serves on the advisory board of Minnesota State Mankato’s Scholars Serving Time program.