Authors
Writers
Bridget Keown is a lecturer in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is leading their gender and science initiative. She received her doctorate in history from Northeastern University, and her MA in Imperial and Commonwealth History from King's College London. Her dissertation focuses on the experience and treatment of war trauma among British and Irish women during the First World War. She is also researching the history of kinship among gay and lesbian groups during the AIDS outbreak in the United States and Ireland.
Cara Delay, Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston, holds degrees from Boston College and Brandeis University. Her research analyzes women, gender, and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland, Britain, and the British Empire, with a particular focus on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth. She has published in The Journal of British Studies, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Feminist Studies, Études Irlandaises, New Hibernia Review, and Éire-Ireland and written blogs for Nursing Clio and broadsheet.ie. Her co-edited volume Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850-1950, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015, and her monograph on Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. At the College of Charleston, she teaches courses on women’s history and the history of birth and bodies.
Emily Contois is Associate Professor of Media Studies at The University of Tulsa. She is the author of Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender & Power Collide in Food Media & Culture (2020) and co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence & Negotiation (2022). She completed her PhD in American Studies at Brown University and holds an MA in American Studies from Brown, an MPH focused in Public Health Nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University.
Karen Weingarten is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Her first book, Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880–1940, was published by Rutgers University Press. She is co-editor of two special issues, Disorienting Disability (South Atlantic Quarterly, June 2019) and Inheritance (WSQ, Spring 2020) and has published articles in Literature and Medicine, Hypatia, Feminist Formations, and Feminist Studies (among other places). She's currently working on a book about the pregnancy test for Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. You can follow her on Instagram @the_home_pregnancy_test for more about this project.
Lara Freidenfelds is a historian of health, reproduction, and parenting in America. She is the author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: a History of Miscarriage in America and The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America. Sign up for her newsletter and find links to her op-eds and blog essays at www.larafreidenfelds.com.
Writers in Residence 2023-24
Clement Masakure is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of the Free State, South Africa. His research interests are on the histories of hospitals and their workers, histories of diseases, health and healing in southern Africa. He is author of African nurses and everyday work in twentieth-century Zimbabwe, published in 2020 by the Manchester University Press. He is also one of the co-editors of Historia, the Journal of the Historical Association of South Africa.
Dr. Jakob Burnham is a Lecturer of Early Modern Europe and the World in the History Department at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Georgetown University in May 2024. His research centers on early French colonialism in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dr. Burnham is particularly interested in the complicated intersections of social practice and colonial development, which he explores through a variety of themes including, medicine, domesticity, and slavery—among others. While Writer-in-residence, he will continue to examine how the archives of eighteenth-century French Indian Ocean history can reveal dynamic questions about the histories of medicine, health, race, and gender.
Jonathan Kuo is an MSc student at the University of Manchester studying the history of science, technology, and medicine. His academic work focuses on the history of twentieth-century health activism across the political spectrum, with particular interest in the fluid boundaries of identity in relation to race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and belief in the Anglosphere and its global connections; he is also interested in writing creative nonfiction and personal essays. His current MSc project examines AIDS activism, race, and diasporic networks in the UK. After Manchester, he will begin his MD/PhD in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Kera Lovell (any pronouns) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah, Asia Campus where they teach courses on US history, women’s history, and global citizenship. Lovell earned their PhD in American Studies at Purdue University in 2017 and is currently working on a book project that traces an undocumented method of postwar urban protest in which activists challenged police brutality and urban renewal by insurgently converting vacant lots into parks. This research has been recognized with numerous awards including the Dumbarton Oaks Research Fellowship, a Graham Foundation research fellowship, a Hoover Institution research fellowship, and Purdue University’s Research Grant Foundation fellowship. You can find their research in a variety of outlets, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, American Studies Journal, Black Perspectives, and Gender Issues.
Nikita Shepard is a PhD candidate in the department of history at Columbia University, researching gender, sexuality, and social movements in the modern United States. Their dissertation traces the history of public bathrooms and political struggles over access to them from the New Deal through the present. Their teaching has covered LGBTQ history, sexuality studies, social and cultural theory, and histories of data and surveillance. Their writings and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Oral History Journal, Social History, Western Historical Quarterly, American Nineteenth Century History, Black Perspectives, Information & Culture, Reviews in Digital Humanities, RFD Magazine, Spectrum South, and the anthology Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023).
Contributors
