Faculty Profile
Educational Background
B.A., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Teaching Interests
- Britain, 1500-1945; France, 1700-1945; Visual Culture; Women, Gender, and Sex Roles; Medicine and Science
Research Interests
- My book, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Britons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) will be released in paperback July 2008. The book has won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best First Book Prize for 2005; Phi Alpha Theta's Best First Book Prize for 2005; the Western Association of Women Historians Best Book of the Year for 2005; it was also been shortlisted by the Royal Historical Society for the Whitfield Prize in British History. For a detailed review: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=149081197579919
- Birthing the Nation illuminates how debates about gender, sexual identities, midwifery, and reproduction vitally shaped the construction of political, religious, and national identities in Britain during the period 1660 to 1840. By using odd stories about the birth of monsters, "pregnant men," murderous midwives, and satires of sexuality and reproduction, the book demonstrates how gender and sex were not separate from the world of politics and public life, but inelectubly intertwined in sometimes surprising ways.
My new projects extend these interests. I am researching and writing on several eighteenth-century stories about gender, love, intimacy, and intrigue that had wider political and cultural import. One project, entitled "The Castrato's Son," explores the relationship of a young Irish Protestant girl and her husband, Ferdinando Tenducci, an Italian castrato and English heart-throb.
- "Invisible Hands and Imaginary Values: Health, Wealth, and Human Labor in the British Imperial Imagination" examines the cultural and intellectual shift between early modern marketplaces and practices that were tangible to ones in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century that were distant in time and space. The project examines topics as diverse as satires about credit economies and the treatment of servants and slaves, the use of corporeal metaphors in Adam Smith and the role of women as objects of exchange, reproducers, and economic actors. An early foray into this project appears in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 1999.
- Additional projects in the works include a history of the fetus from the Renaissance to the present, exploring how the unborn acquire medical, legal, religious, and popular status in the early modern and modern world.
I am also interested in the turn-of-the-twentieth century psychologist, Dr. Hugo Munsterberg, Harvard professor and an established expert in forensic and organizational psychology.
Selected Research and Publications
- Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
- "Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying-in Hospitals," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78.2 (Summer 2004): 309-348
- "The Castrato's Son," forthcoming project on Dorothea Maunsell and Ferdinando Tenducci
- “Sex, Civility, and the Self: Eighteenth-Century Conceptions of Gendered, National, and Psychological Identity,” in a Forum on Nina Gelbart's The King's Midwife and Gary Kates's Monsieur d'Eon is a Woman, French Historical Studies, 24:3 (Summer 2001): 379-409
- “The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform: Gender, Reproduction and Political Economy in England's New Poor Law of 1834,” Journal of Women's History 11.4 (Winter 2000), pp. 131-156. Winner of the Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2000
- “The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives' Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-Midwifery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (Summer 1999), pp. 477-495
- “’No Cure, No Money,’ or the Invisible Hand of Quackery: The Language of Commerce, Credit, and Cash in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Advertisements,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): pp. 103-130
- “The Doctor's in Labour; or a New Whim-Wham from Guildford,” Gender and History 4.2 (Summer 1992): pp. 175-96
- “‘Every Lane Teems with Instruction, Every Alley is Big with Erudition’: Graffiti in Eighteenth-Century London,” in The Streets of London, 1660-1870, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003), pp. 92-111
Selected Awards
- Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize, 2006, for the best first historical work published by a woman in any historical field in 2005, for "Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
- "Birthing the Nation," shortlisted for the Whitfield Prize, the Royal Historical Society, 2006, for the best first book in British History published in 2005
- The Sierra Prize for the best book in any field of history by a member of the society in 2005, Western Association of Women Historians, 2006, for "Birthing the Nation"
- Prize for the Best First Book in any Historical Field, Phi Alpha Theta, the History Honor Society, 2005, for "Birthing the Nation"
- Walter D. Love Article Prize for the best article in any field of British History, North American Conference on British Studies, 2005, for "Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying in Hospitals," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2004
- Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2005, for the best article of the yearby a member of the society in any historical field, for "Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying-in Hospitals"
- Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2002, for the best article of the yearby a member of the society in any historical field, for "The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform," The Journal of Women's History, 2000
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