Miriam Rich

Miriam Rich is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. Her research and teaching focus on the history of science and medicine in the United States, with a particular interest in the historical contexts of gender and racial health inequities. Her current book project, Monstrous Births: Race, Gender, and Defective Reproduction in U.S. Medical Science, 1830-1930 (under contract with Columbia University Press for the Series in Race, Inequality, and Health) explores how the biological category of "monstrosity" interfaced with developing concepts of race, reproduction, and embodied deviance in U.S. history. She has previously written about the racialization of pain in nineteenth-century obstetrics, the social and political contexts of twentieth-century vaccination policy, and the resurgence of historical concepts of race in contemporary genetics and genomics. Her planned second book project focuses on the history of health and medicine within U.S. carceral systems. Before joining the Society of Fellows, she was a lecturer at Yale University, where she taught courses on the history of health and incarceration; the history of reproductive health and medicine; and the history of race, citizenship, and public health in the United States. She has given talks for medical students on the historical contexts of racial health inequities, and also served as a historical research consultant for a project with Yale's SEICHE Center for Health and Justice on incarceration and pandemic healthcare.