Michelle McKinley, Bernard B. Kliks Professor, UO School of Law was appointed as director of the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society on July 1, 2016.
Michelle McKinley teaches Immigration Law and Policy, Public International Law, International Criminal Law, and Refugee & Asylum Law. The recipient of many research fellowships and other honors, Professor McKinley has published widely on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her book Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700, is due out from Cambridge University Press in September 2016. She received the Surrency Prize in 2011 for her article of the same title. In 2014, when she was a fellow in residence at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, she completed this book on enslaved women in colonial Latin America who used courts to litigate their claims to liberty. Professor McKinley has also received research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library.
Before coming to UO, Professor McKinley worked as managing director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. As founder and former director of the Amazonian Peoples’ Resources Initiative, she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights in Peru.
In 1995 she graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as executive editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Dr. McKinley also holds a masters degree in social anthropology from Oxford University.
