Elizabeth O’Brien
Biography
Elizabeth O’Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and Latin American History. She is also a member of the History Department’s cross-field group in the History of Gender and Sexuality.
O’Brien holds an M.A. (2012) and Ph.D. (2019) from the University of Texas at Austin. She also has a Diplomado in the History of Medicine from UNAM, Mexico’s National University. Professor O’Brien has published about various topics in the history of medicine, including the history of fertility control, abortion, eugenics, and obstetric violence; the history of ideas about race, racism, and Indigeneity in medicine; and people’s popular demands for healthcare in 1930s Mexico. Broadly speaking, she is dedicated to examining themes of gender, race, religion, empire, and nation in the production of medical knowledge, while also learning from social movements that envision more just futures.
O’Brien’s book, Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940, was published by The University of North Carolina Press in November 2023. Surgery and Salvation received the 2024 Best Book Award from the Nineteenth-Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association, the 2024 Judy Ewell Award from the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies, and the 2024 Best First Book Award in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion. It also received honorable mentions for three prizes: the Thomas McGann Book Prize in Latin American History (RMCLAS), the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for the best original research-based monograph in the field of history (WAWH), and the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize for books published on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean, from the Latin America and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. Surgery and Salvation was also shortlisted for an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religions, in the category of Historical Studies.
Surgery and Salvation illuminates how religious and theological ideas influenced obstetric surgery over time; how race and class became organizing logics for discourses about surgical advancement; and how childbearing people in Mexico experienced, and sometimes contested, the ways in which patriarchal medical authorities influenced their reproductive choices.
As an undergraduate O’Brien studied Chicano/Latino Studies, which seeded a lifelong commitment to viewing history from multiple perspectives, and especially from below. During undergrad she collaborated with Diana Denham and the CASA Collective to produce Teaching Rebellion: Stories From the Grassroots Movement in Oaxaca, a book of interviews with activists who participated in the Movimiento Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca in 2007 and 2008.
Along with David Carey Jr., O’Brien is co-editor of the “Bodies and Ecologies” series with the University of Nebraska Press. (Prospective authors are encouraged to be in touch!). With UCLA colleagues she helps edit the Hispanic American Historical Review. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Women’s History as well as the “Locating Reproductive Justice: Global and Regional Perspectives” book series, which is co-edited by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz and Lina-Maria Murillo. Along with Professor Miriam Rich, O’Brien will co-edit A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Modern Age (1860-1945). This book is under contract with Bloomsbury Press and will be part of a six book series on reproduction from antiquity to the present.
Publications
Monograph:
Contributor to the following volumes and collections:
Publications:
Co-authored with Miriam Rich, “Obstetric Violence in Historical Perspective,” The Lancet, (2022): 2183-2185.
(Reprint) “The Many Meanings of Aborto: Pregnancy Termination and the Instability of a Medical Category Over Time.” Eds. Roth, Cassia, and Diana Paton. Intimate Politics: Fertility Control in Global Historical Perspective. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024.
“Birthing Empire, Conceiving Nation: New Histories of Reproductive Healthcare in Cuba, Guam, and the United States,” The Journal of Women’s History. 36.4 (2024).
Co-authored with Emily Xiao, MD, “Border Conceptions: Anencephalic Births and Geographies of Bodily Difference in the Rio Grande Valley,” accepted for inclusion in the New Histories of Disability in Latin America, edited by David Carey Jr. and Dillon Vrana. Under contract with The Johns Hopkins University Press, anticipated publication in 2025.
“La medicina científica y las Hermanas de la Caridad en la cuidad de México, 1865-1874,” in México y el Concilio Vaticano I, eds. Pablo Mijangos, Sergio Romero, Matthew Butler. Mexico City: Universidad Pontificia de México/Benemérito Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2024: 387-423.
“‘A Tacit Pact with the State’: Constrained Choice and the Politics of Abortion in 1930s Mexico.” The Journal of Women’s History 34.2 (2022): 53-75.
Co-authored with Farren Yero, “History of Health and Disease in Latin America, 1600-1870.” Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies. March 2022.
Co-authored with Bonnie Lucero, “Histories of Women’s Reproduction in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Choice Magazine 59.2 (2021), 313-319.
“The Many Meanings of Aborto: Pregnancy Termination and the Instability of a Medical Category Over Time.” Women’s History Review 30.6 (2021), 952-970.
- Best Article in the Social Sciences, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section
- Nursing Clio Best Article Prize
Co-authored with Bonnie Lucero, “Pregnancy and Reproduction.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. Ed. Trevor Burnard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
“‘If they are useful, why expel them?’ Las Hermanas de la Caridad and Religious Medical Authority in Mexico City Hospitals, 1861-1874.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 33.3 (2017): 417-442.
“Pelvimetry and the Persistence of Racial Science in Obstetrics.” Endeavour 37 (2013): 21-28.
Translation of and introduction to “Josefina Velásquez Peña’s Accusation Against Dr. Malda: Mexico City, 1930.” HOSLAC: History of Science in Latin America. July 2022.
“The religious history of Caesarean surgery and what it means for the abortion battle: How colonial powers used Caesareans to define the boundaries of unborn life,” Washington Post, March 24 2022.
Awards & Grants
Grants
2022-2023 Fulbright García-Robles COMEXUS U.S. Scholars Research Fellowship, Mexico
2021 The Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, Summer Book Institute Fellow
2020-2023 National Endowment for the Humanities, Project Director of Scholarly Translations and Editions Grant, “Translation and critical edition of Francesco Cangiamila’s Embriologia Sacra (1751)” $215,000
2018 Andrew Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2015 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
2014 Fulbright-García Robles (COMEXUS) Research Fellowship
