I study women, murder, and medicine. Not necessarily all at once, or in that order.
My training, from Clarkson University in upstate New York and the University of Rochester in western New York, is in the history of science and culture in the United States. In 2015, I received a Master’s degree in American History, and began seeking ways to tell the stories of women in history outside of the academy. Most recently, I’ve worked as an interpretive educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and an editor at a feminist medical history blog called Nursing Clio.
I believe that women’s history matters, and it matters because it is connected to our present in ugly and uncomfortable ways. Medicine has always been a force of both oppression and protection for women. Murder has become a site of research for me because murder, unfortunately, has often been the moment that highlights the lives of women more often invisible in the historical record: abuse victims, criminals, gender transgressors, and the many women, including Josephine McCarty, who were a little of everything.