Historical Perspectives On Contemporary Issues

Rana Hogarth is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois and an NEH Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her research project focuses on the medical and scientific constructions of race during the era of slavery and beyond. She discusses the collections she will use as she investigates  – the American Philosophical Society, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University and Rockefeller Archive Center—and the records that are available there that will inform her current book project, Measuring Miscegenation: Eugenic Race-Crossing Studies and the Legacies of Slavery.

Professor Hogarth's previous book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, examined how white physicians defined blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. Her work can be found in numerous scholarly journals including the American Journal of Public Health, American Quarterly, and African and Black Diaspora. In this podcast, she describes her background and her research in Consortium collections.

Closed captioning available on YouTube.