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About Laura Stark
Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.
NBN Episodes hosted by Laura:
April 21, 2023
Diabetes
Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to defy …
April 13, 2023
Skin Theory
An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: …
December 8, 2022
Democracy's Data
Dan Bouk is a writer, professor, and cultural historian of quantification, or as Bouk puts it, the history all fascinating things “shrouded in the clo…
December 8, 2022
The Matter of Black Living
Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthet…
May 18, 2022
In Whose Ruins
The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sample…
April 28, 2022
Medicalizing Blackness
Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the A…
April 28, 2022
Silent Cells
It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and u…
December 9, 2021
Edges of Exposure
What is “capacity”? In science research and health interventions, it typically refers to the relative availability of equipment, infrastructure, perso…
December 9, 2021
Fugitive Science
Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), has already e…
April 30, 2021
Mass Vaccination
Mary Brazelton’s new book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell UP, 2019) could hardly be more timely. During t…
April 29, 2021
Genetic Crossroads
Elise K. Burton’s important book, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford University Press, 2021), documents …
December 3, 2020
OD
Reducing harm or shrinking the likelihood of accidental death are remarkably contentions projects—in areas from sex education, to pandemic management,…
December 4, 2019
Garbage Citizenship
They were throwing garbage in the streets. Rosalind Fredericks makes sense of the garbage-scape of Dakar, Senegal in the wake of the 2007 trash “re…
December 4, 2019
Breathing Race into the Machine
“We cannot get answers to questions we don't ask.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spiro…
April 25, 2018
Building Access
The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” tha…
April 17, 2018
Epigenetic Landscapes
Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It…
November 27, 2017
The Economization of Life
In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of "population" to show the lives this…
April 19, 2017
Poverty Knowledge in South Africa
Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century ea…
April 18, 2017
Imperial Technoscience
Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: T…
December 7, 2016
Hygienic Modernity
Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski's Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press…
April 20, 2016
American Zoo
Urban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociolo…
November 30, 2015
Haeckel's Embryos
Nick Hopwood's Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the q…
November 23, 2015
How Our Days Became Numbered
Who made life risky? In his dynamic new book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Pre…
February 9, 2015
Pills for the Poorest
Emilie Cloatre's award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), lo…