At: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford

Coffee is available from 2.00pm – Seminars begin at 2.15pm prompt

‘Reproduction, Gender, and Sexuality in the History of Medicine’
Conveners: Marisa Benoit and Julianne Weis

Week 7 – 9 June

Bridget Gurtler, Princeton

‘Reproduction reconceived: cryopreservation in science, medicine, and American culture’

Bridget Gurtler holds a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Woodrow Wilson School and is a visiting fellow at the Center for Health and Wellbeing. Her research interests are in the history of medicine, science, gender, and health, with a particular focus on reproduction and reproductive technologies. Her current book project examines the evolution of assisted reproduction and parenthood in American medicine, families, and society. Focusing on the two hundred year history of artificial insemination, it investigates how popular and scientific ideas about gendered bodies, heredity, and risk shaped the transformation of sperm into a (frozen) commodity, were pivotal to separating the act of sex from reproduction, and laid the institutional foundations for the modern fertility industry. While at Princeton, she also looks forward to expanding her new research projects on the history of psychosomatic gynecology, urology, and andrology and to collaborations investigating the history of pediatric drug prescription practices in America. She received her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University in 2013 where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellow and holds a M.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a B.A. from Wellesley College.