BIO
Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu (she/her) is a Presidential Postdoctoral Associate 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. As a historian of science and medicine, Dr. Okwandu's scholarship and teaching contextualize profound racial, gender, and class inequities within the U.S. healthcare landscape from the late nineteenth century to the present. She is particularly interested in examining the historical contexts of psychiatric and reproductive health injustices and sociocultural understandings of health and disease.
Her first book project is entitled Madness and Motherhood in Black and White: A Racial History of Maternal Mental Illness in America. It investigates how racial science and racialized constructions of motherhood informed the evolving classification, diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses (i.e., mental disorders associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period) in the United States from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Recognizing that concepts of motherhood, insanity, and deviance are deeply embedded in larger racial discourses, her project asks how medical constructions of maternal mental illness have been both informed by and (re)produced the American sociocultural ideal of a mother who is white, middle-class, and domestic. In doing so, it illustrates how racialized diagnostic and therapeutic practices associated with maternal mental illness protected hegemonic constructions of white womanhood by reinforcing the conflation between "whiteness" and "good mothering" and "blackness" and "pathological mothering." It also illuminates how historical constructs of maternal mental illness continue to pose barriers for non-white and low-income mothers -- especially Black women -- within medical, legal, and social systems today. Dr. Okwandu will continue to explore the intersection of race, motherhood, and reproductive health in her second book project, a sociocultural, political, and racial history of American doulas that examines how they emerge as "solutions" to crises in the provision of maternal health care, from the 1970s home birth movement to the contemporary Black maternal health crisis.
Dr. Okwandu's writing has been featured in Nursing Clio and is forthcoming in Social History of Medicine, and edited volume titled A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Press), an edited volume titled The Nursing Clio Reader (Rutgers University Press, Critical Issues in Health and Medicine Series). Her work has been supported by the 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.
Dr. Okwandu has remained invested in using her research and teaching experiences to address racial inequity in medicine and gaps in science education. From 2021-2024, Udodiri served as an Anti-Racist Science Education Research and Content Development Consultant for LabXchange, a free science education platform that serves over 10 million learners and educators worldwide. She has also worked as a Creative and Content Consultant with Ancestry -- the largest genealogy company in the world. Finally, from 2020-2021, she served as a Research Historian for the HistoryMakers, non-profit research and educational institution committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold stories of African Americans.
Outside of research, writing, and teaching, Dr. Okwandu enjoys community-building, exploring the aerial arts, practicing yoga, writing poetry, painting, reading fiction, and spending time outdoors.