Sociologist Monica Casper, who has written previously on fetal surgery, has published a new book called Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z. The book consists of a series of essays related to stillbirth and newborn death, arranged alphabetically by topic. Lara: In my research for The Myth… Read more →
Tag: Interview
“Containment and Control, Not Care or Cure”: An Interview with Elizabeth Catte on Virginia’s Eugenics Movement
In Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, Dr. Elizabeth Catte expertly investigates and contextualizes the local history of eugenics in Staunton, Virginia. The story of the former Western State Lunatic Asylum—now renovated as a luxury hotel and pricey condos—demonstrates how race, gender, class and capitalism intersect in the American eugenics movement to… Read more →
The Empire of Depression: A Conversation with Jonathan Sadowsky
Professor Jonathan Sadowsky, Theodore J. Castele Professor at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of two important works on the history of psychiatry: Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria and Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy. Sadowsky is well known in the field for his nuanced and… Read more →
Has the World Gone Mad? An Interview with Sarah Swedberg
Sarah Swedberg is a lifelong activist who engaged in anti-apartheid, AIDS, and anti-war activism in the 1980s and continues to fight for justice for people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. She is also a scholar of the early American republic, with a longstanding scholarly interest in the history of mental illness. Her… Read more →
Ear Trumpets and Archives: An Interview with Jaipreet Virdi about Hearing Happiness
Thank you so much for this book. We’ve both been teaching on Technology & Disability for a few years now, and it’s incredible to see your research in this vein. How do you describe your book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History? Hearing Happiness is both American history and a memoir about what it means to… Read more →
The Slow Moon Climbs: Talking Menopause with Susan Mattern
Recently, I heard an interview with TV anchor Gayle King on the NPR show On Point about her career as a journalist, her recent interview with R. Kelly, and her experience working in a visual field while aging. One caller mentioned the “menopause pooch,” and congratulated King for redefining what a TV anchor looks like. In… Read more →
Intertwined Histories and Embodied Lives: An Interview with Cassia Roth
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 →
Challenging Myth and Misogyny in the Ripper Murders: An Interview with Hallie Rubenhold
In her new book The Five: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, social historian Hallie Rubenhold deftly challenges conventional Ripper mythology with an extensively researched deep dive into the lives of his overlooked and stereotyped victims. Through reconstructions of these women’s individual lifelong experiences, Rubenhold counters the long-held assumption that… Read more →
Civil War Disability in the Light and the Dark: An Interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins
Sarah Handley-Cousins argues in her new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, that the bodies of disabled Union soldiers and veterans “were sites of powerful cultural beliefs about duty, honor, and sacrifice,” yet those ideals became complicated with men who failed to perform the socially accepted role of wounded warrior. Her work… Read more →
Understanding Trauma in the Civil War South: A Conversation with Diane Miller Sommerville
As I’ve written about for Nursing Clio previously, there’s been much debate in recent years about so-called ‘dark’ Civil War history. In that debate, Diane Miller Sommerville has been a vocal advocate for increased attention to the physical and psychological trauma wrought by the war. Her new book, An Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering… Read more →