As a historian of science and medicine, both my research and my teaching pivot around the politics of knowledge production. Each are invested in understanding how ideas about medical authority and expertise are produced and legitimized over time and the racial and sexual politics of this process.
This critical approach to intellectual history is embedded in my pedagogy, which is driven by my commitment to work with students who bring a diversity of life experiences to the classroom. As a first-generation college student, I believe that higher education provides a rare space to step away from what one has always assumed to be true, so as to see the world from another’s perspective. In my classroom, students learn to do just this by historicizing such topics as reproductive health, scientific experimentation, and slavery in the global south, unpacking categories that are often taken for granted and learning to appreciate their contingency. In-class primary source exercises are essential in this regard. By identifying the assumptions and investments of historical actors, students learn that medical science, for example, is far from objective and that concepts often seen as natural and beyond history—including racial or sexual difference—are in fact socially and politically constructed at different moments in time.
To this effect, my courses tie the historical past to the present. I ask students in my classes to share news articles and other contemporary essays that they feel links the current moment to the themes and topics discussed each week. By doing so, students make connections across time and take charge of the classroom, identifying core concepts and leading discussion based on their own interests in the course materials and current events. For example, when I have taught on early modern environmental disasters, including Caribbean hurricanes and Pacific earthquakes, students raised questions and reflected on the racial and class politics that continue to shape how states produce and respond to so-called "natural" disasters, as well as how vulnerable communities rebuild in the wake of these tragedies. These activities are also an opportunity to learn digital literacy, as students are asked to identify and confirm verifiable and reliable sources of online information. My classes also think about our relationship to the past through food. I assign students a recipe project, asking them to consider how some of their favorite meals were made possible by colonialism and the process known as the Columbian Exchange. This activity teaches students how to research and read primary sources that they are personally excited by, such as travelogues, medical texts—and in one fabulous paper, the Medici family archive!—where ingredients might show up in surprising ways.
I believe that learners attain mastery of these skills by working through ideas and then teaching others. I therefore structure classes around activities in which students grapple with a variety of sources, including speeches, travelers’ accounts, memoirs, fiction, images, and secondary analysis of historical events and processes. These documents and images transform students into historians, creating their own interpretations of historical accounts. When I teach Latin American history, for example, I assign a translated excerpt of the diary of Ursula de Jesús, an afro-Peruvian mystic from the seventeenth century. Based on knowledge of the period and analytical skills gained throughout the semester, students first read in pairs and offer their reflections on her diary with the rest of the class. This hands-on approach reinforces their knowledge in a way that my lectures could not. Sources such as de Jesús’s diary ask students to step into the shoes of a historical actor, and in teaching Latin American and Caribbean history, primary sources, even in translation, are especially important in facilitating students’ understanding of places and events that are often completely foreign to them. Through critical and close reading, students learn to appreciate the production of such texts, as well as their afterlives in the historical record and digital repositories, such as the Free Womb Project.
As an instructor, I plan discussions and writing assignments that model this critical reading, creating opportunities for students to evaluate historical narratives through group exercises and structured debate. For example, in the U.S. history class I helped teach, I led a debate in which students were assigned a set of primary sources produced by different twentieth-century feminist activists. I divided the students into pairs and assigned each pair an author from their reading. They were told to argue not only for their individual causes but also from the ideological perspective of their assigned activist. To prepare for this task, they would need to identify the assumptions, biases, and prejudices that these individual authors brought to bear on their writing. The debate allowed the students an opportunity to see their historical skills in action, but it also provided a space from which to empathize, understand, and respectfully defend an alternative point of view. Students then reflected on these readings in discussion, which I structured around an essay by Margaret Sanger, whom students, at first, appeared to favor in the debate. The class identified the following lines by Sanger as particularly revealing of her complicated relationship to the women to whom she dedicated her life to helping.
“The women slink in and out of their homes on their way to market like rats from their holes. The men beat their wives black and blue, but no one interferes…. Pregnancy is an almost chronic condition amongst them.”
“I looked out at the mass and heard a scream. It came from a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who had just come around the corner preparing to visit the clinic. She saw the patrol wagon, realized what had happened, left the baby carriage on the walk, rushed through the crowd to the wagon and cried to me: ‘Come back! Come back and save me!”
-Margaret Sanger, My Fight For Birth Control (1931)
Through lecture, group activity, and a close reading exercise, the students were able to come together and have a meaningful conversation about not only the complicated history of feminist activism in the United States but also the shifting perceptions of birth control throughout the centuries. As one student wrote in response, “Somehow we went from birth control being commonly used, to all knowledge of it being outlawed, to today, where women are still fighting for access to safe and affordable birth control.” Many were surprised to learn that popular attitudes towards contraception had changed so radically over time. It is through such collaborative exercises that I want to engage with my students and establish the overlapping connections between the past and the present.
My history of race and science course incorporates a similar activity, set around the issues of universal abolition and the induction of women to the London Royal Society. The in-class action takes place in general sessions and council meetings of the RS in England during the years 1860-1864 and concerns the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859). Adapted from a Reacting to the Past game, this exercise asks students to consider how arguments over Darwin were imbued with concerns far beyond the scientific merit of his theory. Over the course of several weeks, students taught each other by performing as anthropologists, ethnologists, astronomers, and paleontologists, advancing partisan perspectives developed through primary source readings and additional secondary source materials to provide necessary context.
As an educator, I have learned that students are more likely to engage in these activities when they feel that they belong and have the right to participate in the classroom. I structure discussions around student interest, tailoring my learning objectives, where I can, to questions posed by student response papers. For students to grapple with the histories of race, empire, and power that I teach, an open and respectful classroom is necessary. My course evaluations suggest that my pedagogical approach cultivates such an environment. Students have commented on my willingness to meet and help them outside of the classroom, describing me as an “A+ professor, who cares about her students and work in an exceptional and unique way.”
Because I teach on histories of violence, I am especially careful when assigning group activities, encouraging thoughtful discussion about the expectations of role-play and in-class debate. I incorporate strategies and practices that foster enthusiastic collaboration, beginning with the syllabus. I assign scholarship that provides a diversity of perspectives and foreground work produced by women and scholars of color. In doing so, I ask students to think about how university curricula might replicate the very exclusions that we study in my classroom. To this effect, in teaching Latin American history, I prompt students to think about what narratives they have received; who produced them; and what we can do to challenge exclusionary practices and broaden historical narratives to incorporate more voices and more audiences. Digital storytelling is a key avenue for this pedagogical work, and I look forward to incorporating additional collaborative projects in my teaching, including my planned slave cemetery website.
I have my students write early and often. This requirement allows me to gauge the effectiveness of my teaching, catching any gaps that I thought we had covered in lecture or discussion. By using peer review and final assessment, I encourage my students to think about what elements make up a successful paper. Students learn to offer constructive feedback and also see problems in their own papers when they apply a rubric to their peers’ writing. Students leave my courses writing coherently and persuasively to form an argument that they thoughtfully prove with evidence; this skill will serve them well, whatever their chosen profession may be. To this effect, I incorporate op-ed writing. In my race and science course, students produced clear and effective arguments on subjects ranging from racism in medical education to the ethics of gene patenting and the future of genomic law. Assignments such as these ask students—in this course, for example—training to be chemists, neuroscientists, global health practitioners, and policy analysts to think historically and critically about the disciplines they inhabit, as well as the biases and assumptions that they might inadvertently bring to their research, practice, and policy.
This critical approach to intellectual history is embedded in my pedagogy, which is driven by my commitment to work with students who bring a diversity of life experiences to the classroom. As a first-generation college student, I believe that higher education provides a rare space to step away from what one has always assumed to be true, so as to see the world from another’s perspective. In my classroom, students learn to do just this by historicizing such topics as reproductive health, scientific experimentation, and slavery in the global south, unpacking categories that are often taken for granted and learning to appreciate their contingency. In-class primary source exercises are essential in this regard. By identifying the assumptions and investments of historical actors, students learn that medical science, for example, is far from objective and that concepts often seen as natural and beyond history—including racial or sexual difference—are in fact socially and politically constructed at different moments in time.
To this effect, my courses tie the historical past to the present. I ask students in my classes to share news articles and other contemporary essays that they feel links the current moment to the themes and topics discussed each week. By doing so, students make connections across time and take charge of the classroom, identifying core concepts and leading discussion based on their own interests in the course materials and current events. For example, when I have taught on early modern environmental disasters, including Caribbean hurricanes and Pacific earthquakes, students raised questions and reflected on the racial and class politics that continue to shape how states produce and respond to so-called "natural" disasters, as well as how vulnerable communities rebuild in the wake of these tragedies. These activities are also an opportunity to learn digital literacy, as students are asked to identify and confirm verifiable and reliable sources of online information. My classes also think about our relationship to the past through food. I assign students a recipe project, asking them to consider how some of their favorite meals were made possible by colonialism and the process known as the Columbian Exchange. This activity teaches students how to research and read primary sources that they are personally excited by, such as travelogues, medical texts—and in one fabulous paper, the Medici family archive!—where ingredients might show up in surprising ways.
I believe that learners attain mastery of these skills by working through ideas and then teaching others. I therefore structure classes around activities in which students grapple with a variety of sources, including speeches, travelers’ accounts, memoirs, fiction, images, and secondary analysis of historical events and processes. These documents and images transform students into historians, creating their own interpretations of historical accounts. When I teach Latin American history, for example, I assign a translated excerpt of the diary of Ursula de Jesús, an afro-Peruvian mystic from the seventeenth century. Based on knowledge of the period and analytical skills gained throughout the semester, students first read in pairs and offer their reflections on her diary with the rest of the class. This hands-on approach reinforces their knowledge in a way that my lectures could not. Sources such as de Jesús’s diary ask students to step into the shoes of a historical actor, and in teaching Latin American and Caribbean history, primary sources, even in translation, are especially important in facilitating students’ understanding of places and events that are often completely foreign to them. Through critical and close reading, students learn to appreciate the production of such texts, as well as their afterlives in the historical record and digital repositories, such as the Free Womb Project.
As an instructor, I plan discussions and writing assignments that model this critical reading, creating opportunities for students to evaluate historical narratives through group exercises and structured debate. For example, in the U.S. history class I helped teach, I led a debate in which students were assigned a set of primary sources produced by different twentieth-century feminist activists. I divided the students into pairs and assigned each pair an author from their reading. They were told to argue not only for their individual causes but also from the ideological perspective of their assigned activist. To prepare for this task, they would need to identify the assumptions, biases, and prejudices that these individual authors brought to bear on their writing. The debate allowed the students an opportunity to see their historical skills in action, but it also provided a space from which to empathize, understand, and respectfully defend an alternative point of view. Students then reflected on these readings in discussion, which I structured around an essay by Margaret Sanger, whom students, at first, appeared to favor in the debate. The class identified the following lines by Sanger as particularly revealing of her complicated relationship to the women to whom she dedicated her life to helping.
“The women slink in and out of their homes on their way to market like rats from their holes. The men beat their wives black and blue, but no one interferes…. Pregnancy is an almost chronic condition amongst them.”
“I looked out at the mass and heard a scream. It came from a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who had just come around the corner preparing to visit the clinic. She saw the patrol wagon, realized what had happened, left the baby carriage on the walk, rushed through the crowd to the wagon and cried to me: ‘Come back! Come back and save me!”
-Margaret Sanger, My Fight For Birth Control (1931)
Through lecture, group activity, and a close reading exercise, the students were able to come together and have a meaningful conversation about not only the complicated history of feminist activism in the United States but also the shifting perceptions of birth control throughout the centuries. As one student wrote in response, “Somehow we went from birth control being commonly used, to all knowledge of it being outlawed, to today, where women are still fighting for access to safe and affordable birth control.” Many were surprised to learn that popular attitudes towards contraception had changed so radically over time. It is through such collaborative exercises that I want to engage with my students and establish the overlapping connections between the past and the present.
My history of race and science course incorporates a similar activity, set around the issues of universal abolition and the induction of women to the London Royal Society. The in-class action takes place in general sessions and council meetings of the RS in England during the years 1860-1864 and concerns the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859). Adapted from a Reacting to the Past game, this exercise asks students to consider how arguments over Darwin were imbued with concerns far beyond the scientific merit of his theory. Over the course of several weeks, students taught each other by performing as anthropologists, ethnologists, astronomers, and paleontologists, advancing partisan perspectives developed through primary source readings and additional secondary source materials to provide necessary context.
As an educator, I have learned that students are more likely to engage in these activities when they feel that they belong and have the right to participate in the classroom. I structure discussions around student interest, tailoring my learning objectives, where I can, to questions posed by student response papers. For students to grapple with the histories of race, empire, and power that I teach, an open and respectful classroom is necessary. My course evaluations suggest that my pedagogical approach cultivates such an environment. Students have commented on my willingness to meet and help them outside of the classroom, describing me as an “A+ professor, who cares about her students and work in an exceptional and unique way.”
Because I teach on histories of violence, I am especially careful when assigning group activities, encouraging thoughtful discussion about the expectations of role-play and in-class debate. I incorporate strategies and practices that foster enthusiastic collaboration, beginning with the syllabus. I assign scholarship that provides a diversity of perspectives and foreground work produced by women and scholars of color. In doing so, I ask students to think about how university curricula might replicate the very exclusions that we study in my classroom. To this effect, in teaching Latin American history, I prompt students to think about what narratives they have received; who produced them; and what we can do to challenge exclusionary practices and broaden historical narratives to incorporate more voices and more audiences. Digital storytelling is a key avenue for this pedagogical work, and I look forward to incorporating additional collaborative projects in my teaching, including my planned slave cemetery website.
I have my students write early and often. This requirement allows me to gauge the effectiveness of my teaching, catching any gaps that I thought we had covered in lecture or discussion. By using peer review and final assessment, I encourage my students to think about what elements make up a successful paper. Students learn to offer constructive feedback and also see problems in their own papers when they apply a rubric to their peers’ writing. Students leave my courses writing coherently and persuasively to form an argument that they thoughtfully prove with evidence; this skill will serve them well, whatever their chosen profession may be. To this effect, I incorporate op-ed writing. In my race and science course, students produced clear and effective arguments on subjects ranging from racism in medical education to the ethics of gene patenting and the future of genomic law. Assignments such as these ask students—in this course, for example—training to be chemists, neuroscientists, global health practitioners, and policy analysts to think historically and critically about the disciplines they inhabit, as well as the biases and assumptions that they might inadvertently bring to their research, practice, and policy.