Our Team
The Center for Gender & Sexuality Law is home to two distinct projects, the teams of which are available on each project's website.
For information on the Law, Rights, and Religion Project team, click here.
For information on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project team, click here.
Professor Katherine Franke, Founding Director
Katherine Franke is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and Founding Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law (CGSL). They are also on the Executive Committees of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Center for Palestine Studies. She is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, sexuality race, and religion drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory.
Professor Franke is the founder of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, a think tank based at CGSL that develops policy and thought leadership on the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights. In 2021, Professor Franke launched the ERA Project, a law and policy think tank to develop academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice.
Their first book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality (NYU Press 2015), considers the costs of winning marriage rights for same-sex couples today and for African Americans at the end of the Civil War. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 to undertake research for Wedlocked. Her second book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Slavery’s Abolition (Haymarket Press 2019), makes the case for racial reparations in the United States by returning to a time at the end of slavery when many formerly enslaved people were provided land explicitly as a form of reparation, yet after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the land was stolen back from freed people and given to former slave owners.
Professor Kate Redburn, Co-Director
Kate Redburn (they/them) writes legal history and theory of gender and sexuality, religion, and political economy in the late 20th and early 21st century United States. Their primary research project traces the rise of religious objection to anti-discrimination law since 1964. A second project looks at transgender legal history in the U.S.
Kate received their JD from Yale Law School in 2020, where they helped found the LPE Blog, and served as the blog’s first Managing Editor. Kate is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies also at Yale. In 2020-2021 they served as a law clerk to the Hon. Guido Calabresi on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Kate’s academic work has been published or is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, and Law and History Review. They also write essays and book reviews about the history of sexuality, transgender politics, and constitutional law for a general audience.
Daniela Sweet-Coll, Administrative & Communications Officer
Daniela is the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law's communications and design specialist. She manages the websites and social media presences of the Center as well as the ERA and Law Rights & Religion Projects. Daniela joined the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law in 2023 after working as an independent graphic designer and Spanish-English translator. She completed her undergraduate degree in Wesleyan University’s interdisciplinary Design and Applied Sciences program, receiving honors for her digital design-focused thesis.