After spending ten years as a faculty member at the University of Oregon, Julie Novkov is an associate professor of political science and women's studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.  Her research and teaching are situated at the intersection of law, history, US political development, and subordinated identity. She views law as both a system of political and social control and as a site for reform through activists' pressure. She is particularly interested in the way that the law defines and translates categories associated with identity, such as race and gender, and the ways that these categories transform and are transformed by legal discourse.

Her first book, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2001), addressed gender and constitutional development, rereading through the lens of gender the history of the courts' unwillingness to accept protective legislation for workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her second book, tentatively entitled Racial Constructions and forthcoming from Michigan in 2007, uses the history of Alabama's efforts between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the civil rights era to suppress interracial sexual intimacy as a site to investigate the rise of white supremacy.  She has also authored several articles in scholarly journals and books, including a 2002 article in Law and History Review.  She is currently working on two co-edited volumes, one on race and US political development and another on race, gender and militarization.  Her next major research project will be a political and developmental history of the legal regulation of child labor in the United States.