On Monday 9 December 2024 Emma Day (University College London) will be the fourth speaker for our 2024-2025 Seminar Series on Modern North American History, organized in cooperation with the Sciences Po Center for History (CHSP) in Paris.

Lecture title: Beyond Procreation: A New History of Reproductive Justice in the United States
Lecturer: Emma Day
Date: Monday 9 December from 17:00 to 18:30 CET
Location: Online

Please register here before Friday 6 December.

Dr Emma Day is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Her research focuses on the intersections between sexuality and gender and science and medicine in United States history. Her current research project, Beyond Procreation: A New History of Reproductive Justice in the United States, examines the creation and maintenance of the concept of ‘reproductive health’ and its role in shaping the politics of the gendered body in the United States since the nineteenth century. This work builds on her first book, In Her Hands: Women’s Fight Against AIDS in the United States (California, 2023), which arose from doctoral research completed at the University of Oxford. Her research has also appeared in Public Health and the American State, ed. Di Tommaso, Fazzi, Scott-Smith (Edinburgh, 2024) and Modern American History, among others.

The lecture introduces my new research project, Beyond Procreation: A New History of Reproductive Justice in the United States. Beyond Procreation investigates the making of medical knowledge on the reproductive body in the United States. Examining research, treatment, and activism around a range of reproductive experiences, the research analyses the relationship between childbearing and the concept of reproductive health in United States history. The lecture will present the main research questions as well as the themes, methods, and approaches of the project. The lecture will also discuss my recent research into the work of nineteenth century gynaecologists whose efforts to shape gynaecological surgery as a distinct field of medical inquiry strengthened the association between reproductive health and fertility in a way that impacted future reproductive care.

Click here for the official invitation.