Anna Kirkland is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, where she is a former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She holds courtesy appointments with the School of Law, Sociology, Political Science, and Health Management and Policy.

Kirkland works at the intersections of law, health, and society, and has won funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She is the author of three books, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients (University of California Press, 2025), Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (New York University Press, 2016), and Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008), and is at work on a new project about infertility insurance coverage.

Kirkland has been active in the Law and Society Association for over twenty years, co-chairing the graduate student and early career workshop, chairing the Herb Jacob Book Prize Committee, serving on the dissertation award and the diversity committee, helping to organize and grow the Law and Health CRN, and serving on multiple service panels to support junior scholars.