Wangui M Muigai

Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History

Departments/Programs

African and African American Studies
Health: Science, Society, and Policy
History

Degrees

Princeton University, Ph.D.
Princeton University, M.A.
Harvard University, A.B.

Expertise

History of medicine, public health, and science

Profile

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Wangui Muigai is a historian of medicine and science. Her research examines critical issues in race and health, reproduction, and the histories of childbirth and childhood. She is completing a book project on the history of black infant mortality in the U.S. With support from the Greenwall Foundation her next project examines Black women's historical and contemporary views on trust in health care. Named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow for her scholarship that “addresses important and enduring issues confronting our society," her research has been supported by several awards and fellowships including from the American Association for the History of Medicine, John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture at Duke University, and Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, she was the History Fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Washington, D.C.

Courses Taught

AAAS	170a	Black Childhoods
AAAS/HIS	131a	African Americans and Health
AAAS/HIS	154b	Race, Science, and Society
HIS/HSSP	142a	Health Activism
HSSP	110a	Integrative Seminar on Health

Awards and Honors

Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2022)

Faculty Scholar, Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics (2022 - 2025)

Michael L. Walzer '56 Award for Teaching (2021)

Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award in 20th Century History of Medicine or Biomedical Sciences, American Association for the History of Medicine (2020)

Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article (2020)

Karen Buhler-Wilkerson Faculty Research Fellowship, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania (2019)

Theodore and Jane Norman Award for Faculty Scholarship (2019)

HistoryMakers Archive Grant (2018)

History Fellow, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (2017)

Shryock Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine (2017)

Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, Princeton University (2015 - 2016)

Scholarship

Muigai, Wangui M. "Framing Black Infant and Maternal Mortality." Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 50. 1 (2022): 85-91.

Muigai, Wangui (with Projit Bihari Mukharji, Myrna Perez Sheldon, Elise K. Burton, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Terence Keel, Emily Merchant, Ahmed Ragab, and Suman Seth). ""A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data"." Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 111. 2 (2020): 310-353.

Muigai, Wangui. "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 by Rana A. Hogarth, and: Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens (review)." African American Review 52:4 (2019): 399-402.

Muigai, Wangui. "“Something Wasn’t Clean”: Black Midwifery, Birth, and Postwar Medical Education in All My Babies." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 93. 1 (2019): 82–113 (*Winner of the Nursing Clio inaugural prize for best journal article).

Muigai, Wangui (with Felix Rietmann, Mareika Schildmann, Caroline Arni, Daniel T. Cook, Davide Giuriato, Novina Gohlsdorf). "Knowledge of Childhood: Materiality, Text, and the History of Science – An Interdisciplinary Round Table Discussion." The British Journal for the History of Science 50. 1 (2017): 111-141.

Muigai, Wangui. "Race and Infant Mortality from Slavery to the Great Migration." Schlesinger Library Newsletter (2015): 9-10.

Muigai, Wangui. "Looking Uptown: Margaret Sanger and the Harlem Birth Control Clinic." Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter 54 (2010): 1-5.