Professor Kalsem joined the faculty of UC’s College of Law in 2001. With Professor Verna Williams, she co-directs the university’s joint-degree program in Law and Women's Studies, a pioneer program for which the College of Law is nationally known. Professor Kalsem teaches in the areas of commercial law, bankruptcy, feminist legal theory, and law and literature. In 2003, she received the Goldman Prize for Teaching Excellence.

Prior to joining the UC faculty, Professor Kalsem taught at the University of Iowa’s College of Law and Department of English while completing her doctoral studies. Her interdisciplinary scholarship on 19th-century women and the law was supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Grant and an American Fellowship from the Association of University Women.  Professor Kalsem continues to write in the areas of women's legal history and the cultural study of law.  Most recently, she has written about issues of gender, race, and class in the contexts of bankruptcy reform and consumer protection.

Professor Kalsem has presented papers at national and international conferences, including meetings of the Law and Society Association and the Association of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.  She has served as chair of the American Association of Law School's Section of Law and the Humanities and currently sits on the Executive Board of the Section.

Prior to teaching, Professor Kalsem practicedmlaw in Chicago with the law firm Sidley & Austin.

Download a copy of Professor Kalsem's Curriculum Vitae (pdf).

Publications

Social Justice Feminism, UCLA Women’s Law Journal (forthcoming 2008) (with Verna L. Williams).

Book Review, 25 J. Legal History 659 (2007) (reviewing Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (2005))

Bankruptcy Reform and the Financial Well-Being of Women: How Intersectionality Matters in Money Matters, 71 Brooklyn Law Review 1181 (2006).

Women's Work Is Never Done: Employment, Family and Activism: An Introduction, 73 U. Cin. L. Rev. 361 (2004) (with Verna L. Williams).

Law, Literature, and Libel: Victorian Censorship of "Dirty Filthy" Books on Birth Control, 10 Wm. & Mary J. Women & Law 533 (2004).

Looking for Law in All the "Wrong" Places: Outlaw Texts and Early Women's Advocacy, 13 S. Cal. Rev. Law & Women's Studies 273 (2004).

Alice in Legal Wonderland: A Cross-Examination of Gender, Race, and Empire in Victorian Law and Literature, 24 Harvard Women's Law Journal 221 (2001).

In Defense of "Murderous Mothers": Feminist Jurisprudence in Frances Trollope's Jessie Phillips, 5 Journal of Victorian Culture 179 (2000).