Office Hours
By Appointment
In the news
Education
PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
About Me
I joined Auburn University’s History Department in the fall of 2022. I am an historian of medicine and science, specializing in early modern Italy. My research focuses on the history of reproduction and the intersections of gender, the body, sexuality, and knowledge production. I am particularly interested in women’s role in the formation and transmission of medical and scientific knowledge, both inside and outside of traditional scientific spaces. I engage with such topics as anatomical modelling, reproductive technologies, midwifery and obstetrical education, and the history of the fetus. My first book, Authority, Gender and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries (Routledge, 2021), traced the development of formal midwifery schools and maternity wards in eighteenth-century Italy. I am currently the editor of A Cultural History Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Early Modern Period, 1500-1765, part of Bloomsbury’s Cultural History Series. My next book project explores the history of conceptions of fetal viability.
I earned my PhD in history at UNC Chapel Hill in 2014. Before arriving at Auburn, I was an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania from 2015-2022, a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University’s Center for Historical Analysis from 2019-2020, and a Fulbright scholar in Italy from 2011-2012.
I teach both halves of the Technology and Civilization core sequence, as well as courses on the history of medicine, madness, and sexuality. I welcome applications for graduate study in the history of medicine, the history of reproduction, and the history of sexuality and the body.
Research Interests
History of medicine; women’s and gender history; history of the body and sexuality; history of reproduction; material culture & medical technologies; early modern Italian history
Publications
Books
Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries. New York and London: Routledge, 2021.
(editor) A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Early Modern Period, 1500-1765. London: Bloomsbury. In progress.
Articles & Book Chapters
“The Midwife’s Bag: Tracing the Objects of Professional Identity in Pre- and Post-Unification Italy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Special Issue on ‘Reproductive Objects,’ vol. 99, no. 1 (Spring 2025)
“What Does the Eye Have to do with Obstetrics?” The Fetus between Sight and Touch in Eighteenth- Century Italy.” In Rethinking the Public Fetus: Historical Perspectives on the Visual Culture of Pregnancy, edited by Elisabet Björklund & Solveig Jülich. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2024.
“When the Fetus becomes a Child: Some Thoughts from the Long Eighteenth Century.” In Rethinking Medical Humanities: A Perspective from the Arts and the Social Sciences, edited by Rinaldo F Canalis, Massimo Ciavolella, Valeria Finucci. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2023.
“Modelling Authority: Obstetrical Machines in the Instruction of Midwives and Surgeons in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 34, no 2 (May 2021), 509-531.
“Midwifery Anatomized: Vesalius, Dissection, and Reproductive Authority in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 48 no. 1 (January 2018), Special Issue on “Vesalius and the Languages of Anatomy”
Courses Taught
- HIST 1210: Technology and Civilization I
- HIST 1217: Honors Technology and Civilization I
- HIST 1220: Technology and Civilization II
- HIST 3600: History of Sexuality
- HIST 3580: History of Madness
- HIST 5970/6970: Special Topics: Gender & Medicine