Dr. Sandra Patton-Imani is a Professor of American Studies at Drake University, where she teaches Anthropology, Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Maryland at College Park in American Studies with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. She is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School. She earned a B.A. in radio/tv/film and American Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Dr. Patton-Imani is the author of BirthMarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, New York University Press 2000, Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood, New York University Press, 2020, as well as numerous scholarly articles on race, gender, reproductive justice, sexuality, adoption, and family. She is currently writing her next book, focusing on a 1745 trial in Virginia in which a clergyman was accused of attempted rape and sexual abuse of Ann Fairfax Washington (the biracial daughter of William Fairfax and husband of Lawrence Washington, older brother of George Washington). Through this buried history, she explores the ways that power inequalities shape the construction and maintenance of the archive and thus determine what constituteshistory.
