Let the People Vote: A Conversation on Voter Rights and Suppression

In the midst of an election year and as we look toward November 5th, remembering the history of voter suppression and the continued fights for voter rights in the United States remains vital to our democracy. The annual Masha Dexter Lecture on Gender, Sexuality, and Public Policy presents a conversation on voter rights, suppression, and mobilization with Gilda Daniels, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and author of Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in America (2020) and Juliet Hooker, the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University and author of Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (2023). Through this conversation, attendees will learn about the history of voter suppression and how people are advocating for voter access at the local and national levels.

Featured speakers:

Gilda R. Daniels, Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law

Juliet Hooker, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science, Brown University

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About Gilda R. Daniels

Gilda R. Daniels is a Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She is a former Deputy Chief in the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Voting Section. She also served as Litigation Director at Advancement Project National Office-supporting the justice, education, immigrants’ rights and voting projects-, a staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and is currently a Consultant at the Campaign Legal Center. Professor Daniels is a nationally recognized voting rights and election law expert. She has investigated, negotiated, and litigated cases involving the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act and other voting statutes. She teaches Election Law, Appellate Advocacy, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure, and Critical Legal Theory, which includes jurisprudence, critical race theory, socioeconomics, and access to justice.

Professor Daniels is the author of UNCOUNTED: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in America (NYU Press, released January 2020, paperback release October 2021). Ms. Magazine called Uncounted“required reading.” STARRED Booklist said that it “provides a road map and …a valuable resource for all participants in civic life.” She has drafted and participated in amicus briefs filed in the United States Supreme Court on various civil rights and constitutional issues, frequently consults on voting rights cases, and is well published. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, law, and democracy. Her law review articles have appeared in California Law Review, George Washington Law Review, among others, and her writings have also been published in print media outlets and quoted in the national press, including the Washington Post and NPR’s All Things Considered.

About Juliet Hooker

Juliet Hooker is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University, where she teaches courses on racial justice, Black political thought, Latin American political thought, democratic theory, and contemporary political theory. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of multiple award-winning books, including Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009), Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton, 2023), and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section, and Black Grief/White Grievance was awarded the 2024 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and was a finalist for the PROSE Award in Government and Politics from the Association of American Publishers in 2023, a Library Journal Best Social Science Book of the Year, and a Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year.

Host or Publisher Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender