Professor Mary Ziegler Named Guggenheim Fellow

Professor Mary Ziegler has been named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. This fellowship will provide support for Professor Ziegler to work on her book project, Personhood: The New American Fight Over Equality and Reproduction. 

On April 5, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the 171 Guggenheim Fellows selected from nearly 2,500 applicants. 

Mary Ziegler is an expert on the law, history, and politics of reproduction, health care, and conservatism in the United States from 1945 to the present. She is one of the world’s leading historians of the U.S. abortion debate. 

She is the author of numerous articles and six books on social movement struggles around reproduction, autonomy, and the law, including Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2018), the award-winning After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2015), which won the Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first manuscript in any discipline, Reproduction and the Constitution (Routledge, 2022), Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (Yale University Press, 2022), and most recently, Roe: The History of a National Obsession (Yale University Press, 2023). She is also the editor of a major international collection with Elgar Press about abortion law around the world.

She is a graduate of Harvard College (2004) and Harvard Law School (2007). Before coming to Davis, she was a professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she won several teaching awards, and the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, PBS Newshour, CNN, and the Washington Post.