Making Sense: Examining the Haptic in Slavery and Medicine
Deirdre Cooper Owens

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Deirdre Cooper Owens is an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY in Queens, New York and an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. After earning her Ph.D. in History from UCLA, she served as a Carter G. Woodson Fellow at the University of Virginia. Additionally, Professor Cooper Owens has won a number of awards and honors that range from serving as an American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology Fellow in Washington, D.C. to being the inaugural recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston Award from the Black
Feminist Project. A popular public speaker, she has published essays, book chapters, and blog pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences. Recently, Cooper Owens finished working with Teaching Tolerance and the Southern Poverty Law Center on a podcast series about how to teach U.S. slavery and was listed as an “acclaimed expert” on U.S. history by Time Magazine in its annual “The 25 Moments From American History That Matter Right Now.” Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (UGA Press, 2017) won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the OAH as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. Professor Cooper Owens is also the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the country’s oldest cultural institution. Currently, she is working on a second book project that examines mental illness during the era of United States slavery and is also writing a popular biography of Harriet Tubman that examines her through the lens of disability.

This lecture was established to honor the memory of our beloved colleague, Stephanie M.H. Camp, who was the Donald W. Logan Family Endowed Chair in American History, and the author of the award-winning book Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004). Before her untimely death in 2014, Professor Camp was writing a book about race and beauty. Her work remains a powerful influence on the fields of race, gender, and slavery in and beyond American history. This lecture is made possible by the generous contributions to the Stephanie Camp Lecture Fund for the History of Race and Gender, www.giving.uw.edu/StephanieCamp.

To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at 206-543-6450 (voice), 206-543-6452 (TTY), 206-685-7264 (fax), or dso@uw.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event.