JUDITH LORBER is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at The Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.  She received her Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1971 and began developing and teaching courses in women’s studies in 1972. She was the first Coordinator of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Women's Studies Certificate Program and was Founding Editor of Gender & Society, official publication of Sociologists for Women in Society. 

She is the author of Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, Paradoxes of Gender, and Women Physicians: Careers, Status and Power, as well as numerous articles on gender and on women as health care workers and patients. She is co-author of Gender and the Social Construction of Illness and Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives, and co-editor of the Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, Revisioning Gender, and The Social Construction of Gender.   

Professor Lorber received the American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard Career Award in 1996 for “scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.” She was President of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2001-2002, Chair of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association in 1993, and President of Sociologists for Women in Society in 1981-82.  

She has held several international visiting professorships. In 1992-1993, she had a Fulbright Award for lecturing at Bar Ilan University and for research in Israel. She was Guest Professor at Åbo Akademi, Turku, Finland, in 1996. In 1997, she held the Marie Jahoda International Visiting Professorship of Feminist Studies at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. In the last few years, she has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Dortmund, Germany, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Bar Ilan University and at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany.