Smith, Susan
Dr. Susan L. Smith
(Professor of History)
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison (1991)
M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison (1986)
B.A., University of California, Irvine (1982)
2-20 Tory Building
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB T6G 2H4
Tel. (780) 492-2576
| Expertise & Research Interests |
USA; women/gender; health/medicine; race/ethnicity
My research examines the history of gender, race, and health in the United States in the twentieth century. It examines the ways that health issues reflect and shape beliefs, values, and power dynamics in society.
In my first book, I investigated the history of African Americans and public health in the American South, and demonstrated that black women’s health activism was a form of civil rights activity. In my second book, I examined the history of Japanese Americans and midwifery in Hawai’i and the American West Coast. I found that Japanese immigrant midwives were not only key childbirth attendants, but also cultural workers enmeshed in national and international politics, especially in wartime. In my third project, I was a co-investigator for an interdisciplinary study of the history of palliative care and the dying in twentieth-century Canada.
My current research examines the toxic legacies of the unfought chemical war of World War II. It explores the human and environmental health consequences of American and Canadian military medical experimentation with mustard gas. It investigates American race-based experiments, the promotion of an “Alberta Advantage” in research, and the postwar sea disposal of chemical warfare agents by the U.S. and Canada.
| Teaching |
HIST 251 - American History 1865 to the present
HIST 351 - History of Women in the U.S.
HIST 353 - History of American Medicine
HIST 450 - Topics in American History: Racial Politics, Gender, and Health
HIST 650 - Topics in U.S. Women’s History [graduate course]
History 251 Bibliography
History 353 Bibliography
| Publications |
BOOKS
Japanese American Midwives:Culture, Community, and Health Politics, 1880-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,2005),280pp.
Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired:Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 247 pp.
ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS
"Mustard Gas and American Race-Based Human Experimentation in World War II," Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, v. 36 , n. 3 (Fall 2008): 517-521.
"Midwife at Minidoka: Toku Shimomura and World War II,” in Minidoka Revisited: The Paintings of Roger Shimomura, edited by William Lew (Lee Gallery, Clemson University; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 56-65.
"Teaching the History of Public Health and Health Reform,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, v. 19, n. 5 (September 2005): 27-29.
“Nursing the Dying in Post-Second World War Canada and the United States,” co-authored with Dawn D. Nickel in Women, Health and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945, ed. by Gina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kate McPherson (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 330-354.
Donna M. Wilson, Susan L. Smith, Marjorie C. Anderson, Herbert C. Northcott, Robin L. Fainsinger, Michael J. Stingl, and Corinne D. Truman, “Twentieth-Century Social and Health-Care Influences on Location of Death in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, v. 34, n. 3 (October 2002): 141-161.
Donna Wilson, Herbert Northcott, Corrine Truman, Susan Smith, Marjorie Anderson, Robin Fainsinger, and Michael Stingl, “Location of Death in Canada: A Comparison of Twentieth-Century Hospital and Non-Hospital Location of Death and Corresponding Population Trends,” Evaluation and the Health Professions, v. 24, n. 4 (December 2001):385-403.
“Caregiving in Camp: Japanese American Women and Community Health in World War II,” in Guilt by Association: Essays on Japanese Settlement, Internment, and Relocation in the Rocky Mountain West, ed. by Mike Mackey (Powell,Wyoming: Western History Publications, 2001), 187-201.
"Medicine, Midwifery, and the State: Japanese Americans and Health Care in Hawai’i, 1885-1945,” Journal of Asian American Studies, v. 4, n. 1 (February 2001): 57-75 .
“From Home to Hospital: Parallels in Birthing and Dying in Twentieth-Century Canada,” co-authored with Dawn D. Nickel, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, v. 16, n. 1 (1999): 49-64.
“Women Health Workers and the Color Line in the Japanese American ‘Relocation Centers’ of World War II,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (Winter 1999): 585-601.
“Making the Connection: Public Health Policy and Black Women's Volunteer Work,” in Beyond Image and Convention: Explorations in Southern Women's History, ed. by Janet L. Coryell, et al. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 138-157.
“Welfare for Black Mothers and Children: Health and Home in the American South,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, 4 (Spring 1997): 49-64.
“Neither Victim Nor Villain: Nurse Eunice Rivers, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and Public Health Work,” Journal of Women’s History 8 (Spring 1996): 95-113.
“Whitewashing Womanhood: The Politics of Race in Writing Women’s History,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparee 22 (March 1995): 93-103.
“White Nurses, Black Midwives, and Public Health in Mississippi, 1920-1950,” Nursing History Review 2 (January 1994): 29-49.