Welcome to the new Nursing Clio!
The editors and writers of Nursing Clio are celebrating our 3-year anniversary with a new design and a fresh approach to the history of gender, health, and medicine. We have spent the last few months retooling and reimagining the blog, and we hope you are as excited about the new changes as we are!
First, take a look around! Nursing Clio’s layout editor and developer, Adam Turner, has redesigned the site with a greater focus on reading and accessibility. Nursing Clio grew out of the wordpress.com network and now runs on a self-hosted WordPress installation. In addition, Adam designed and built a custom theme just for Nursing Clio (built on a theme called Bones). Adam built the new design with a focus on reading and sharing ideas, and in the spirit of universal design. Nursing Clio is now mobile friendly and over the next few weeks we hope to bring it in line with all accessibility best practices. Adam is a historian first and a web developer second, so the new theme is still on training wheels. If you notice any bugs, or have any other feedback, please contact us to let us know.
While the site looks new and shiny, Nursing Clio remains, most importantly, a collaborative blog project that ties historical scholarship to current political, social, and cultural issues related to gender, health, and medicine. We will continue to provide a platform for historians, students, healthcare workers, community activists, and the public at large to analyze, discuss, and debate these kinds of connections between past and present.
Just as before, we will be publishing the long-form, scholarly pieces that we are known for – essays that have made Nursing Clio a go-to source for historical analyses of present-day issues. A new addition to our project is to also focus on shorter, historically-informed responses to the world around us. We want to create a balance between fun conversations, political debate, and serious scholarship.
As part of this expanded mission, Nursing Clio is proud to welcome Sarah Handley-Cousins to our editorial team. In addition to writing several great pieces for Nursing Clio over the past year, Sarah is a PhD candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she is currently hard at work on a dissertation about the lives of disabled and troubled Union Civil War veterans.
Welcome to the team, Sarah!
We also would like to welcome three new writers to our collective — Leah Reis-Dennis, Cassia Roth, and Lauren MacIvor Thompson.
Leah Reis-Dennis is Executive Producer of Poetry in America, a multi-platform initiative in collaboration with Harvard University and WGBH Education, aimed at making American poetry more engaging and accessible. Every month, “Versing Clio” will feature a poem from the American canon that integrates gender, history, and medicine.
Cassia has written several guest posts for Nursing Clio over the past year. She is a PhD candidate in Latin American History with a concentration in Gender Studies at the University of Los Angeles, California. Her dissertation, titled “A Miscarriage of Justice: Reproduction, Medicine, and the Law in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1890-1940),” examines reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro.
Lauren also contributed to Nursing Clio as a guest author and is also a doctoral student at Georgia State University. Her dissertation focuses on the influence of eugenics, spiritualism, and the law on the Progressive Era women’s movement. Lauren is also a senior writer at the historical blog, Tropics of Meta.
Welcome, Leah, Lauren, and Cassia!
We have so many great essays and fun posts to share with you, both from our writing staff and our guest authors; we can’t wait to get started. On a final note, over the past three years, we’ve come to believe that what makes Nursing Clio special is the wonderful community the site has fostered between scholars, activists, health care workers, and interested readers. We look forward to continuing the dialogue. Welcome back!
Jacqueline Antonovich is the creator and co-founder of Nursing Clio and served as executive editor from 2012 to 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. Her current research focuses on women physicians, race, gender, and medical imperialism in the American West. Jacqueline received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2018.