In A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil, Cassia Roth offers an innovative approach to the intertwined histories of honor, reproduction, maternity, and medicine in modern Brazilian history. With deep archival research, nuanced argumentation, and sensitivity toward historical actors — their suffering and their agency — Roth traces… Read more →
Elizabeth O’Brien
Elizabeth O’Brien
Contributor
Elizabeth O’Brien is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book project, Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790–1940, uses archival as well as published theological and medical sources to examine how philosophical changes concerning fetal ensoulment, racial heredity, and surgical ethics played out under religious, republican, and revolutionary governments, thereby contributing to the formation of the Mexican state. She is also working on a collaborative project, which will offer the first Italian-English translation of Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila’s Embriología Sacra (1751). O’Brien’s research has been published in Endeavour and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, and is under review with The Journal of Women’s History. Her scholarship has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies/The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the History of Science Society, the American Historical Association, and the Tinker Foundation.