I’m a historian of medicine committed to telling complex, meaningful stories that challenge simplified narratives about health, bodies, and policy. My work focuses on the cultural and political histories of women’s reproductive health and, more recently, the history of the criminal mind.

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I’ve authored four books: Building a Better Race (UC Press), Bodies of Knowledge (Chicago),  Coming Home (Oxford), and Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam (Polity) exploring topics from eugenics to reproductive health. My current book project, entitled “Picking the Brain to Map the Mind: Morphology, Murder, and the Rise of the Psychiatric Expert Witness,” seeks to identify the early twentieth-century origins and evolution of the psychiatric mission to unlock the secrets of the brain by studying its morphology (the study of the brain’s size, shape, and structure).  

 

After 14 years at the University of Cincinnati, I joined Purdue University in 2014 as the Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine, where I direct the Medical Humanities Certificate Program and continue an active research and teaching agenda.

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My research has been supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library, the British Academy and Fulbright, and featured in PBS’s American Experience and Netflix’s Sex, Explained. Outside the classroom, I’m also a SCUBA diver and violinist with the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra