Join the Department of History in welcoming historian Miriam Rich to discuss her work Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2026).

This talk explores the history of “monstrous birth” in modern U.S. medical science, tracing the practices and ideas that transformed newborn bodies into scientific specimens of monstrosity. Recast as a biological phenomenon, the monster gained new social and cultural salience across the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Monstrosity gave form to pervasive anxieties about the meaning of racial difference, the fragility of racial descent, and the volatility of women’s reproduction—and contributed to ideas about deviant and defective bodies that still haunt us today.

Professor Miriam Rich is a historian of U.S. medicine, science, and health, currently assistant professor at University of Texas Medical Branch, (Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities), where she holds the James Wade Rockwell Professorship in Philosophy of Medicine. Her research explores the troubled history of “monstrous birth” as a category in modern medical science, revealing how historical practices produced enduring ideas about human difference. Her writing appears in journals such as Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The Lancet, Isis, Gender & History, New Genetics and Society, and Revista Ciência & Saúde Coletiva.

Find out more about Monsterous Conceptions: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/monstrous-conceptions/9780231200325/.

All are welcome.