[21] She has authored three books and co-edited one collection of essays, and has contributed chapters presenting original research in numerous edited volumes, including, most recently, Lori Reed and Paula Saukko's Governing the Female Body (SUNY Press 2010), Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas' Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care (Stanford University Press 2010), and Ann Laura Stoler's Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American Empire (Duke University Press 2006).

She reviewed the state of the field of gender studies in Vicki Ruiz, Eileen Boris, and Jay Kleinberg’s The Practice of U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues (Rutgers 2007) and contributed the accompanying article on the keyword “Science” in the second edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press 2007).

[22] In 2009, Briggs and Diana Marre published International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children (NYU Press), a collection of critical essays that defines reproduction in its relation to law and family and highlights perspectives from both sending and receiving countries.

In doing so, it examines "everyday life practices, ideological constructs, and government programs associated with family reproduction, marital strategies, sexuality, and the use (and abuse) of women`s bodies.

"[1] Sara Dorow writes that "by viewing political history through the lens of adoption, Somebody’s Children turns conventional methodologies of adoption inside out" and "makes a significant contribution to a growing body of scholarship that recognizes that the story of struggles over kinship is also the story of institutional and international configurations of power and of raced, classed, and gendered productions of subjectivity.

"[30] Briggs writes, “The massive changes in the economy since the late 1970s—stagnant real wages, shrinking government support for everything from schools to roads to welfare, ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘moral hazard’ as the reasons for vast public policy changes—were driven in significant part through a demonization of the reproductive labor of people understood to be women, particularly women of color, and all people who do care work.

"[2] By drawing connections between, among other things, the rise of neoliberalism and shifting discourses surrounding race and immigration, the regulatory function of reproductive technologies, and the cultural phenomena of welfare reform, gay marriage, and the subprime mortgage crisis, Briggs analyzes the factors that led to the Trump presidency and the current socio-economic state of the US.

[33][34] Briggs was awarded the 2002 Constance Rourke Prize for her article "The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology,” published in the June 2000 issue of American Quarterly.

The following year she received an ABOR Learner-Centered Education Grant to develop a library of online course materials for gender and women's studies.