Kimberlé Crenshaw is a Professor of Law, teaching at both the UCLA and Columbia Law Schools on race, gender, constitutional rights, and other civil-rights related issues. A prominent figure in the Critical Race Studies movement, Ms. Crenshaw was named Professor of the Year at UCLA in both 1991 and 1994. She is a fellow in-residence at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford University, was named the chair of Fulbright Latin America in 2007, and became an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow in 2008. Along with Professor Luke Harris, in 1996 she founded the African American Policy Forum in order to advance and expand racial justice and gender equality and advocate for the indivisibility of all human rights.

Ms. Crenshaw’s publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993). Her short-form work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the National Black Law Review, among many others. The equality clause of the South African Constitution bears the mark of her work on race and gender.

In the words of one of the HLS community members who nominated Ms. Crenshaw, “She changed the way black feminists articulate our various experiences of both sex and racial oppression and the way that many movements address and interact with different members who experience systems of oppression in different ways.”

Ms. Crenshaw is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, class of ‘84.