Biography of Kristin Luker

Kristin Luker is currently a professor of Sociology as well as a professor in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley where she has been teaching since 1986. In addition to the University of California Berkeley, her resume boats faculty positions both from Princeton University and University of California San Diego as Doris Stevens Chair of Women’s Studies (Princeton) and Assistant, Associate and Full Professor (University of California, San Diego) She is clearly ambitious and has shown a proclivity for higher education, a fact that is all too obvious through her acquisition of a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968 as well as a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University in 1974.
She currently holds the esteemed position of the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Chair at the University of California, Berkeley in acknowledgment of her works in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, law and public policy.
Dr. Luker has written and published five books as well as numerous scholarly articles regarding the aforementioned disciplines. Her books accurately depict her interests which include sexual and reproductive behavior, gender and the relationship between gender and morality, psychology, law and public policy. Her first book Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept was published in 1975 with a second edition published with a new introduction in 1991; this book has led to her receipt of the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association. Her second book titled Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood was published in 1984 and received the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society from the Study of Symbolic Interaction. She published her third book Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of the Teenage Pregnancy Crisis in 1995 which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1996. In 2004 she published her fourth book When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties and finally her most recent book Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut was recently published in August 2008.