Katherine Turk

Katherine Turk studies women, gender and sexuality and their intersections with law, labor and social movements in the modern United States. She is Associate Professor of History and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Her prizes and fellowships include and a 2018-19 faculty fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in 2011-12, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the American Society for Legal History, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill. Turk also won UNC’s Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2023.

Turk’s first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines how sex equality law has remade the world of work, eroding some inequalities and affirming others. Equality on Trial won the 2017 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History and the 2012 Lerner-Scott Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to many academic articles and book chapters, Turk’s public writing has appeared in Slate, Washington Post, and Public Seminar, among others. Her newest book is The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023).

A Chicago native, Turk holds a B.A. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. She lives with her family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.