About Us

Karissa Haugeberg

Karissa Haugeberg

Eva-Lou Joffrion Edwards Newcomb Professor in History, School of Liberal Arts

Karissa Haugeberg is the Eva-Lou Joffrion Edwards Newcomb Professor in History at Tulane University. Her first book, Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century (Illinois, 2017) traced the forty-year history of the contemporary US anti-abortion movement. Her work has appeared in the Middle West Review, the Journal of Urban Studies, the Journal of Women’s History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. She is completing a book on the history of US nursing since 1964. With Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Haugeberg edits the textbook Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford); the tenth edition will be published in 2025. At Tulane, Haugeberg teaches classes on US women’s history, legal history, and the history of medicine.

Clare Daniel

Senior Professor of Practice and Director of Research, Newcomb Institute

Clare Daniel is Senior Professor of Practice and Director of Research at Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her book, Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), charts a shift in the political and popular discourse about adolescent pregnancy in the wake of the 1996 U.S. welfare reform policy. Her work on reproductive politics has also appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,  American Journal of Public HealthFrontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Women’s Health Issues, Feminist Media Studies, Social Sciences, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online (Athabasca University Press, 2024). Her opinion pieces have been published in The Advocate, The Hill, and Ms., among others. She received the 2020 Coalition Builder Award from the National Women’s Studies Association for her work with the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition. She is also a founding editor of the Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online digital guide, which received the 2024 Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.

Kate Baldwin

Kate Baldwin

Professor of English and Communication Studies, School of Liberal Arts

Kate Baldwin is a scholar and teacher who specializes in comparative literary and cultural histories. Her first book, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, remaps black American modernism by addressing the involvement of African-American intellectuals with Soviet communism and a Russian intellectual heritage. Her most recent book, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side (2016), examines the relationships between domestic space and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Looking at midcentury design, film, advertising, fashion, and literature, The Racial Imaginary shows how structures of feeling associated with U.S. domesticity were taken up, championed, reconstituted, and resisted in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s. Baldwin’s new book on women, race, and work developed from a course she started teaching a decade ago called “Motherhood and its Discontents.” Her articles chronicling these issues have been published by the Huffington Post, The Hill, Quartz, Global Post, and Truth-Out.

Sarah Hedgecock

Sarah M. Hedgecock

Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Liberal Arts

Sarah M. Hedgecock is the Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow at Tulane. Her work engages the fields of religious, childhood, and gender studies, and she is currently at work on a book project about nostalgia, relationality, and white American evangelical girlhood from the Cold War to the present day. Her work has been supported by the American Examples program at the University of Alabama and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University, as well as research grants from Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. Sarah received a Ph.D. in religion at Columbia University and holds a B.A. in anthropology from Princeton University.

Darcy Roake

Darcy Roake

Ph.D. Candidate, History, School of Liberal Arts

Darcy Roake is a Unitarian Universalist Minister who is a PhD candidate in history at Tulane University with a focus on the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements. Reverend Roake was formerly the Minister at Community Church Unitarian Universalist, a sanctuary congregation in New Orleans, LA. She has a wide background in social justice and pastoral care in settings as varied as Oxfam America, Amnesty International, the United Nations, the Navajo Nation Public Defender’s Office, Massachusetts General Hospital, Planned Parenthood’s National Clergy Advocacy Board, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Darcy received a B.A. in Religious Studies from Brown University and graduated with a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. She has published essays in Guernica, and The New Orleans Advocate, among other venues; was named a “Faith Leader to Watch in 2016” by the Center for American Progress and is a former Mellon and current Sawyer and Monroe Fellow. Rev. Darcy proudly continues her scholarship and community ministry, focusing on reproductive justice, in Louisiana. 

Community Partners

Birthmark Doulas

www.birthmarkdoulas.com/

Birthmark is a New Orleans birth justice cooperative that supports, educates, and advocates for pregnant and parenting people and their families, with a focus on access to respectful services for communities facing barriers to care. All birthing people deserve dignified birth and parenting experiences that build power, self-determination, and nurturing care.

HER Health Nurse

www.herhealthnurse.org/

HER (Health Education and Reproductive Justice) Health Nurse is a health education organization that provides evidence-based sessions and publications. Their mission is to empower girls and young women to make reproductive health choices with confidence.

Lift Louisiana

www.liftlouisiana.org/

Lift Louisiana builds a better Louisiana for women, girls and gender expansive people by advocating for reproductive health, rights and justice. Lift works collaboratively within a changing LA repro landscape to provide legislative advocacy, legal support, and educational outreach, while championing systemic change.

Louisiana Abortion Fund (LAAF)

www.louisianaabortionfund.org/

The Louisiana Abortion Fund is a community fund that assists neighbors in overcoming the economic and geographic barriers to abortion care by providing low-barrier financial support for abortions and support for travel and childcare. In the pursuit of justice and liberation for all, LAAF aims to center the most marginalized in particular, Black people, Indigenous communities, people of color, queer folks, and immigrants.

Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC)

www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-gulf-coast

PPGC ensures the right and ability of all individuals to manage their sexual and reproductive health by providing health services, education, and advocacy. “Care. No matter what.” is their promise as a health care provider, educator, and advocate to truly care, no matter who you are, no matter where you live.

Repro TLC (formerly Midwest Access Project)

www.reprotlc.org/

Repro TLC improves access to comprehensive reproductive health care by training providers in abortion and miscarriage care, contraception, pregnancy options counseling, and beyond. Repro TLC fills gaps nationwide in clinical training and education and mobilizes their network to advocate for more just and equitable sexual and reproductive care.

Sista Midwife Productions (SMP)

www.sistamidwife.com/

Sista Midwife Productions is a birth advocacy training and consulting agency. SMP creates educational events for communities, birth workers, and organizations that work with childbearing families. SMP’s vision is to create a paradigm shift in the ways individuals and communities think about conception, pregnancy, birth, and parenting.

VAYLA

www.vayla-no.org/

Through diasporic storytelling, VAYLA nurtures emerging Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders in New Orleans and beyond, centering community care, lived experience, and collective resilience to confront generational challenges across environmental justice, reproductive health, and civic engagement.