17 – 18 September 2025
San Francisco State University has a proud tradition of organizing conferences for Constitution and Citizenship Day, a national holiday that commemorates the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. The conference provides multiple opportunities to reflect critically on the past, present, and future of constitutional rights, freedoms, citizenship, democracy, equality, and justice.
Keynote Speakers
This year’s event will feature two keynote speakers:
Jonathan Gienapp
Jonathan Gienapp will present "Constitutional Originalism and History." He is Associate Professor of History and Law at Stanford University and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Professor Gienapp's first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (2018), explores how understandings of the U.S. Constitution transformed during the decade following its ratification. It won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association. His second, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (2024), addresses originalism’s engagements with history. He has published work in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, Law and History Review, Constitutional Commentary, and The Boston Globe. Gienapp is currently working on a book that explores the forgotten history of the Constitution’s Preamble.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers will present "Rethinking Gender, Slavery, and the Constitution." She is Chancellor's Professor and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019), which won the Lapidus Center Harriet Tubman Prize, the Southern Association for Women’s Historians’ Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s Best Book Prize, the Organization of American Historian’s Merle Curti Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. Jones-Rogers is currently at work on two new projects. Her second book, “Women of the Trade,” reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering English, African, and Afro-English women, free and captive. Her third, “Women, American Slavery, and the Law,” will examine the relationship between gender and the evolution of American slave/property law in both the North and the South.
Contact
Further details about the conference program will be announced in the coming weeks. The conference coordinator is Marc Stein, Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History (marcs@sfsu.edu). The sponsors are the College of Liberal & Creative Arts, the History Department, and the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Chair in U.S. History.
Accessibility
The conference sponsors are the College of Liberal & Creative Arts, the History Department, the History Students Association, and the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Chair in U.S. History. The Rights and Wrongs conference welcomes persons with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodations upon request. SFSU students, faculty, and staff with disabilities who need reasonable accommodations are encouraged to contact the Disability Programs and Resource Center (DPRC), which is available to facilitate the reasonable accommodations process. The DPRC is located in the Student Service Building and can be reached by telephone (voice/415-338-2472, video phone/415-335-7210) or by email (dprc@sfsu.edu). Others who need reasonable accommodations for this event can contact Marc Stein at marcs@sfsu.edu as soon as possible so the request can be reviewed.
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