Meet
Your Host
Sally J. Kenney is a faculty member in the Political Science Department at Tulane University, where she is also an affiliated faculty member in the law school and Africana Studies, and an adjunct professor in the Global Community Health and Behavioral Science Department of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She served as director of the Newcomb Institute and held the Newcomb endowed chair from 2010-2022. Her research interests include sexual violence, women’s imprisonment, women and leadership, gender and judging, judicial selection, feminist social movements, women and electoral politics, the European Court of Justice, exclusionary employment policies, and pregnancy discrimination. She is the author of Gender and Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter.
A native of Iowa, Sally J. Kenney earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Iowa, a B.A. and M.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. From 1989-1995, she held a joint appointment in Political Science, Women’s Studies, and Law at the University of Iowa. She served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs from 1995-2009 where she also directed the Center on Women and Public Policy.
She teaches courses on the politics of rape, women in prison, and women, judging, and digital literacy. She has taught courses at both the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women and Homestead Correctional Institute for Women.
She is a feminist activist, pickleball player, yoga practitioner, reader, junior master bridge player, and birder.
Follow her on Instagram (@sallyjanekenney1959) or on Twitter (@skenney18).
For a comprehensive account of her work on gender and judges, see Work on Gender and Judges
SJK’s Work on
Sexual Violence
Kenney has taught an undergraduate course on The Politics of Rape at Tulane and has been a national leader on sexual assault on campus. She was one of the original planners of the Dartmouth Summit on Sexual Assault with David Lisak and Claudia Bayliff. She led a team of Tulane staff and students who attended that conference. Kenney was invited to the White House for the release of the Its On Us Report. As the executive director of the Newcomb Institute for twelve-and-a-half years, she brought many leading researchers to campus to speak on their scholarship on sexual assault and assembled a consortium of faculty, students, and staff interested in working on the issue which evolved into the Sexual Violence Prevention and Education Committee until the Provost and President’s Chief of Staff eliminated it n preparation for the release of Tulane’s first climate survey.
The Newcomb Institute first screened the films Invisible War and The Hunting Ground which brought one of the filmmakers, Amy Zierling to town. Questioning following the screening of The Hunting Ground led Tulane to make more transparent its reporting of complaints that evolved into the Shifting the Paradigm annual event, suspended as of the 2023-24 school year. NI hosted several trainings for faculty about changing requirements to report sexual assault on campus; it hosted Assistant Secretary of Education Catherine Lhamon for a campus convening in 2014. NI sponsored three conferences for student activists on sexual assault. Kenney was an active member of the Sexual Assault Taskforce responding to Tulane University’s ARC3 climate survey with garnered over 50% response rate. She attended the Stanford Conference on Title IX Advocacy in the Trump Era. She served on the Tulane Sexual Assault Climate Taskforce and chaired the Provost’s Committee on Sexual Harassment. In the fall of 2018, she spoke at the University of Kentucky’s annual conference on sexual assault on campus and delivered an address at the University of Houston on sexual assault and restorative justice. In the spring of 2019, she delivered a paper at the Stanford Institute of Behavioral and Social Sciences. She has published her own survivor narrative, “Does Any Woman Have Just One Survivor Story?” in Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy edited by Laura A. Gray-Rosendale. Kenney worked closely with the Alliance for Sexual Choice seeking to roll back mandatory reporting policies and ban non-disclosure agreements. In 2022 she attended the national conference of End Violence Against Women International.
In the 2019 Newcomb Summer Session, Kenney and Laura Wolford taught a one-week course for high school students on Dismantling Rape Culture which they offered online in the summer of 2020. Newcomb Institute hosted An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Sexual Violence on February 7, 2020. In the fall of 2020, Kenney and Wolford offered an Honors Colloquium on Dismantling Rape Culture for first-year students and Kenney taught that course again in the fall of 2021 along with her advanced seminar on The Politics of Rape. Newcomb Institute hosted a second symposium on Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy in February of 2022 (Keynote talk: https://youtu.be/fl50Jzh6UYM
Symposium panels: https://youtu.be/TvOboy-gpsk and https://youtu.be/dB2cTckoXVI). Kenney spearheaded an undergraduate certificate program in Gender-Based Violence.
From 2022-23, Kenney taught two courses on sexual violence at the Homestead Correctional Institute for Women in Florida under the rubric of the non-profit organization Exchange for Change. Kenney worked closely with the Prouts and I Have the Right To to stop the confirmation of Michael Delaney to the federal bench.
She completed the six-day intensive train-the-trainer course pioneered by Professor Charlene Senn at the University of Windsor to facilitate its Enhanced Assess Acknowledge and Act program for incoming college students proven to reduce the incidence of sexual assault in May of 2023. In the spring of 2024, Kenney taught a new course, Preventing Sexual Violence, that certifies students to be facilitators of the EAAA program.
She is currently the chair of the board of the nonprofit organization Friends of the Nancy J. Cotterman Rape Crisis Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Deconstructing Rape is her first podcast.