Meet Professor Claire McKinney!
The William & Mary Department of Government is proud to welcome Assistant Professor Claire McKinney! Professor McKinney received her undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in June of 2014. McKinney completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in American Intimacies in American Culture Studies at the Washington University in St. Louis this past year.
Her research focuses on the restructuring of the reproductive rights debate. McKinney hopes to shift the discussion around abortion rights from the “relationship between a woman and her doctor” to focusing on “the doctor” which has been so often ignored by political and moral debates. Part of her research also involves the ways that the debate about a woman’s right to choose can be changed from one so rooted in morality and bringing it into the political realm.
McKinney recently presented at the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Annual Conference in Philadelphia on the work that breast cancer memoirs are doing to reconstruct the way we think about trauma and those it effects.
In the fall, she is teaching a Contemporary Political Theory class and will be teaching a Politics of Reproduction course in spring of 2017. McKinney says that she loves the brand new Tyler Hall, finds it to be a “great work space,” and has found the Government faculty to be “wonderful, friendly, and giving.”
Welcome to William & Mary, Professor McKinney!
