Deirdre Cooper Owens, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Queens College, Queens, N.Y., will deliver the 2018 Linda and Charles Wilson Humanities in Medicine Lecture April 3 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Eppley Science Hall Auditorium.
Dr. Cooper Owens will speak on “Medical Bondage and the Birth of Gynecology.”
In the presentation, Dr. Cooper Owens moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how 19th 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 black enslaved women and Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and restores for us a picture of their lives.
Dr. Cooper Owens 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 and was awarded the Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Prize for women’s history upon graduation.
Dr. Cooper Owens’ book, “Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology,” was released in November from the University of Georgia Press. In her book, she traces the relationship between slavery and women’s professional medicine in early America.
Lunch is available for the first 25 attendees.
The forum will be livestreamed here. (If you have trouble viewing the stream during the event, call Video Services at 402-559-8090.)
This looks very interesting! Will it be streamed or recorded if we are unable to attend?