October 8, 2024
Presented by Deirdre Cooper Owens, associate professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut.
For decades, the United States has been the most dangerous high-income earning nation for pregnant Black women and birthing people. The current birthing crisis didn’t originate in a vacuum. With roots in colonial America, medical doctors and surgeons exceptionalized Black women’s medical experiences and lives throughout slavery and Jim Crow. Cooper Owens will present on the layered history of American slavery, the birth of gynecology, and the current U.S. birthing crisis offering insights and possible solutions to end this state of emergency.
The program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the departments of Africana studies, history, women’s, gender & sexuality studies and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center. This program was initiated by the Clarke Forum’s student project managers. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s annual theme, Alternative Models.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Deirdre Cooper Owens is an associate professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut. Before her most recent appointment, she simultaneously directed the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia and headed a medical humanities program at the University of Nebraska. Cooper Owens is a popular public speaker, writer, and reproductive justice advocate who is an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Fellow, and a newly elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Advisory Council of SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic). Cooper Owens has won several prestigious honors and awards for her scholarly and advocacy work in history and reproductive and birthing justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology won a Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. It has been translated into Korean and will be translated into Brazilian Portuguese. She is currently working on a popular biography about Harriet Tubman that examines her life through the lens of disability and a historical monograph about race, medical discovery, and the C-section with origins in Louisiana.
About the Morgan Lectureship: The Morgan Lectureship was endowed by the board of trustees in 1992, in grateful appreciation for the distinguished service of James Henry Morgan of the Class of 1878, professor of Greek, dean, and president of the College. The lectureship brings to campus a scholar in residence to meet informally with individuals and class groups and to deliver the Morgan Lecture on topics in the social sciences and humanities. Scholars have included Jorge Luis Borges, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power, Art Spiegelman, Sandra Steingraber, Kay Redfield Jamison, Patricia Hill Collins, Winona LaDuke, Lila Abu-Lughod, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Anthony Appiah.
For more information, please visit: https://www.clarkeforum.org/tuesday-october-8-2024/
Further information
- Location: Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium
- Time: 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
- Cost: Free