Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s recent book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is a call for revolution. “Out there is a reality where fat Black folks are experiencing the harms of anti-Blackness as anti-fatness,” they write; “Black liberation is the end goal, and for it to happen, fat liberation must also be… Read more →
Category: Clio Talks
Babylost: An Interview with Monica Casper
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 →
Why Sad Salads Are No Laughing Matter: An Interview with Emily Contois
Whether you’ve seen The Hairpin’s 2011 “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” or not, you’re in for a treat. Emily Contois analyzes this well-known photo essay in a recently published chapter, “Laughing Alone with Salad: Nutrition-Based Inequity in Women’s Diet and Wellness Media,” as part of Food for Thought: Nourishment, Culture, Meaning, edited by Simona Stano… Read more →
Bodies in Doubt, A New and Expanded Edition: An Interview with Elizabeth Reis
I first met Elizabeth Reis at a conference about intersex several years ago, and we became fast friends. Lizzie served on the board of interACT, the country’s largest intersex advocacy organization, when I was the board president, and though neither of us are on the board anymore, we both have continued our activism in various… Read more →
“Who Cares?”: A Conversation on Murder and Women with Katherine Dykstra
Katherine Dykstra’s What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl is much more than a book about murder. It starts with a close study of the death of eighteen-year-old Paula Jean Oberbroeckling, who disappeared from her Cedar Rapids home in the middle of the night in July 1970. Oberbroeckling’s remains were discovered… Read more →
Abortion Out West: An Interview with Alicia Gutierrez-Romine
Published in 2020 by the University of Nebraska Press, Alicia Gutierrez-Romine’s From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920–1969 tells the story of abortion during the era it was outlawed in California. We recently chatted about how Gutierrez-Romine came to the topic, the challenges of telling these women’s stories, and why California… Read more →
Captivity, Breastmilk, and the Myth of Colonial Supremacy: An Interview with Carla Cevasco
Carla Cevasco is the winner of the second annual Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article. Her winning submission, “‘Look’d Like Milk’: Colonialism and Infant Feeding in the English Atlantic World,” appeared in the Journal of Early American History in 2020. Dr. Cevasco is an assistant professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her… Read more →
“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 →