Draft:Kara W. Swanson

Kara W. Swanson is an accomplished scholar and historian, known for her work as a legal practitioner who works in intersections of gender and sexuality, property law, race and racism, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. Swanson is currently a Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law.

Swanson trained as a biochemist and molecular biologist during her undergraduate studies at Yale University, graduating with a bachelor of science in 1987. She then earned her Master’s Degree and Juris Doctor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1988 and 1992, respectively. She then earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2009.

Professor Swanson's research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Before coming to Northeastern, she was the Berger-Howe Fellow in Legal History at Harvard Law School and asscoaite professor at Drexel University School of Law.

She is a current member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. She was also selected as the 2020 Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellow by the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smothsonian Museum of American History to support her project, “Inventing Citizens: Race, Gender, and Patents.”

Awards
Swanson has been awarded numerous accolades for her contributions. In 2015, she received the Robert D. Klein University Lectureship, which is awarded to a member of the faculty across the university who has obtained distinction in his or her field of study and is one of the most prestigious prizes at Northeastern. Professor Swanson was awarded the 2018 History of Science Society's Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize for her article "Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office." In 2021, she was recognized for her exceptional scholarship in the field of race, racism and the law, for her essay "Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on 'Invention of a Slave'" by the Law & Society Association's John Hope Franklin Prize. In 2022, Swanson was awarded the Martha Trescott Prize from the Society of the History of Technology, which is awarded to outstanding published historical essay in the area of women in technology, for her article "Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents."