Book Projects

Description for Capitalism and Medicine: A History coming soon.

In Collected Without Consent: A Global History of Harvard Medical School’s Racial Skulls, I will uncover the ways in which scientific and medical ideologies about difference and inheritance have been built upon the exploitation of marginalized people found far outside the walls of universities. Focusing on Harvard Medical School’s collection of racial skulls, this project analyzes the complicit natures of medicine, race, and global empire in the nineteenth century. Racial museum exhibitions created and reinforced much of the ideologies underlying empires, while collectors relied on imperial conflicts to produce human remains. This project also intimately considers the lives lost to make these collections possible. Specifically, Collected Without Consent will tell the story of nineteenth-century global imperialism through microhistories of people whose stolen skulls were sold or donated to Harvard’s medical museum. Through attention to the lives of those whose skulls were collected, this monograph seeks to subvert the process of erasure that undergirded universities’ medical museums and their histories. In short, I aim to write an alternative afterlife for these individuals that challenges narrations of their existence in racial museum displays and tables of measurements.