Research Interests: History of medicine and public health; race and science; history of psychiatry; history of reproductive medicine and health; critical theories of race and gender; medical humanities.

Udodiri R. Okwandu is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science Department and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. Broadly, her research explores the intersection of race, gender, and medicine and cultural understandings of health and disease. Her dissertation traces how scientific and medical understandings of maternal mental illnesses – such as postpartum depression and psychosis – have been used to rationalize the “transgressive” behavior of childbearing women from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century. In doing so, she demonstrates the ways in which these rationalizations served to either excuse or pathologize women in ways that mapped onto existing racial and class hierarchies. She illuminates the consequences of these discourses by examining various sites, including the courts, asylum, family planning clinic, psychoanalytic research “lab,” and sterilization laws.

Udodiri graduated cum laude rom Harvard College with an A.B. in the History of Science (Mind, Brain, and Behavior track) and a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy. Her senior thesis, which won the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, an award which recognizes outstanding scholarly work or research by students selected by a committee of faculty from Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, examined the medicalization and racialization of Civil Rights protests in the 1960s/70s, contextualizing it with the rise of law-and-order political ideology

Presentations:

“Managing Misbehaving Mothers: Maternal Mental Illness and Postpartum Sterilization in North Carolina, 1934 – 1970.” American Association for the History of Medicine 96^th Annual Meeting, Symposium Presentation, Ann Arbor, MI, May 2023.

“Maternal Mental Illness, Culture, and the Making of American Mothers and Children in Postwar America.” American Historical Association 136^th Annual Meeting, Symposium Presentation, Philadelphia, PA., January 2023.

“Classifying Maternal Mental Illness: Race and Diagnostic Categories in the Early Twentieth Century.” History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Symposium Presentation, Chicago, IL, November 2022.

“Mad or Bad?: Race and the Medico-Legal Construction of Maternal Mental Illness in the Early 20^th Century.” Association for the Study of African American Life and History 107^th Annual Meeting, Montgomery, AL., September 2022.

“Carceral Psychiatry, Abolitionist Psychiatry.” American Association for the History of Medicine 95th Annual Meeting, Lunch Workshop, Saratoga Springs, NY, April 2022.

“Violence and the (Black) Brain: Race, Law and Order Politics, and the Medicalization of Civil Rights Protest, 1960 – 1975.” Stanford University, Guest Lecturer for General Adult Psychiatry Training Program, taught by Dr. Matthew Edwards (virtual), February 2022

Previous Degrees: 

A.B., History of Science, Harvard College