2018 Linda and Charles Wilson Humanities in Medicine Lecture
Monday, April 2, 3:30-5
The Sheldon Auditorium (1209 R Street)
Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens (Queens College)
"Medical Bondage & the Birth of Gynecology"
Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. She retells the story of the rise of modern gynecology from the perspectives of black enslaved women and Irish immigrant women.
Bio for Owens:
Deirdre Cooper Owens is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY in Queens, New York. She has won a number of prestigious honors that range from the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies to serving as an American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology Fellow in Washington, D.C. Dr. Cooper Owens attended two historically black colleges, Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University where she received an M.A. in African American Studies. In 2009, she earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in History was awarded the Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Prize for women’s history upon graduation.
A popular public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has lectured domestically and abroad to diverse audience. She has published essays, book chapters, and popular blog pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences. Cooper Owens has also made a number of appearances on national media outlets like NPR, PBS, Slate, “Black America with Carol Jenkins”, and Al Jazeera America as an expert on issues of race, racism, and U.S. slavery and continues to lecture widely across the country. Currently, she works on issues related to reproductive justice and anti-racism and is currently working with Teaching Tolerance and the Southern Poverty Law Center on a podcast series about how to teach U.S. slavery.
Cooper Owens’ book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, release in November 2017 from the University of Georgia Press. In her book, she traces the relationship between slavery and women’s professional medicine in early America. She is working on a second book project that examines mental illness during the era of slavery and is also writing a popular biography of Harriet Tubman.