Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. As a Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, she earned her PhD and MA in the History of Science. Dr. Okwandu’s scholarship and teaching center reproductive justice through an interdisciplinary historical lens, examining how sociocultural and scientific constructions of race and gender have shaped medical knowledge and practice in the United States. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the present, her work uncovers the history and lasting impact of reproductive and psychiatric health injustices on Black communities—especially Black women.
Her first book project, Madness and Motherhood in Black and White: A Racial History of Maternal Mental Illness in America, traces the history of maternal mental illness—mental disorders associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period—through the lens of racial categorization. Recognizing that concepts of motherhood, insanity, and deviance are deeply embedded within broader racial discourses, the project examines how medical constructions of and responses to maternal mental illness have both reflected and reinforced the American sociocultural ideal of white, middle-class, domestic motherhood. In doing so, it reveals how racialized diagnostic and therapeutic practices surrounding maternal mental illness upheld hegemonic constructions of white womanhood by sustaining the conflation of “whiteness” with “good mothering” and “blackness” with “pathological mothering.” The project also illuminates how these historical constructs continue to shape contemporary medical, legal, and social barriers faced by nonwhite and low-income mothers—especially Black women.
Her second project, Birth Work and the Color Line: Race, Care, and the Politics of the Doula in America, examines the sociocultural, political, and racial history of American doulas, exploring how they have emerged as “solutions” to recurring crises in maternal health care—from the 1970s home birth movement to the contemporary Black maternal health crisis. Building on her broader interest in race, motherhood, and reproductive health, this project traces how doulas have come to embody shifting ideas about care, expertise, and justice in U.S. reproductive politics.
Dr. Okwandu publications reflect a sustained engagement with the historical, sociocultural, and racial dimensions of maternal and psychiatric health. Her article, “The War on Postpartum Psychosis: Elizabeth B. Davis, Voluntary Sterilisation, and the Fight Against Poverty in Black Harlem, 1960–1978,” is forthcoming in Social History of Medicine. Two articles, “On Mothers Who Kill and the Racialization of Postpartum Mental Illness” and “If They Were White and Insured, Would They Have Died: Contextualizing the 2022 Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Report,” appear in The Nursing Clio Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2025). She also has a forthcoming article, “Science and Medicine,” in A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Press).
Her work has been generously supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Association for University Women, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Commission on Women and Gender Studies, the Harvard Merit/Graduate Society, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Dr. Okwandu is in the process of becoming a certified doula, providing her with a firsthand perspective on the practices, challenges, and community dynamics of contemporary birth work.