Dr. Wangui Muigai will be leading a reading group exploring three distinct frameworks (theoretical, methodological, and analytic) for understanding the causes of racial health disparities. Two articles take us back to the 1990s wave of research on “minority health” and ethnic health disparities, revealing how a generation of researchers in the biological, social, and epidemiological sciences sought to elucidate the relationship between racism and health. A more recent article places that era of research, with its attention to the impact of stress on the internal environment of the body, within a longer genealogy of research on race, racism, and health. Among other threads for discussion, Dr. Muigai hopes we can consider the legacies of these concepts on contemporary scientific, medical, and popular discussions of Black health, including the Black maternal and infant health crisis.

Dr. Wangui Muigai is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University in the departments of History, African & African American Studies and the Health: Science, Society, and Policy Program. Dr. Muigai was named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and selected as a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics. Her first book, on the history of infant death in the Black experience, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.

The event is part of the year long Mellon Sawyer Seminar series Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine.