Katherine Paugh is a specialist in early American history, with particular interests in race, gender, medicine, and the body. She has been the recipient of awards, including the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians article prize, and grants and fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Huntington Library, and the Harvard Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World.
Her first book traced the emergence of politically charged debates about the role of motherhood in sustaining the slave labour force in the American South and the Caribbean. She is currently at work on a second book about the history of venereal disease.
Selected Publications
The Politics of Reproduction in the Atlantic World: Race, Medicine, and Fertility during the Age of Abolition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
“The Curious Case of Mary Hylas: Wives, Slaves and the Limits of British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 35.4 (2014): 629-651
“Yaws, syphilis, sexuality, and the circulation of medical knowledge in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic world,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88.2 (2014): 225-252
“The Politics of Childbearing in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World during the Age of Abolition, 1776–1838,” Past and Present 221.1 (2013): 119-160
