Wangui M Muigai

Assistant Professor in 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; history and politics of reproduction; history of childhood.

Profile

Wangui Muigai is a historian of medicine and science. Her research focuses on race and health, the politics of reproduction, and the histories of childbirth and childhood. Currently, she is working on a book-length project on black infant mortality in America from slavery to the present day. Her scholarship has been supported by several fellowships and grants including through the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Virginia Historical Society.

Courses Taught

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

Awards and Honors

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. "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.

Wangui Muigai (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.