Emma Day

Emma Day

Emma Day
Fellow-in-Residence
emma.day@rai.ox.ac.uk

I am a historian of the twentieth century United States specialising in the intersections between sexuality and gender and medicine and disease. My first book, In Her Hands: Women’s Fight Against AIDS in the United States (California, 2023), explores the interplay between women’s health activism and political action in shaping the AIDS epidemic in the US. I am currently working on a new project which examines the making of medical knowledge on the reproductive and non-reproductive body in the twentieth century US.

Publications

  • Emma Day, In Her Hands: Women’s Fight Against AIDS in the United States (University of California Press, August 2023).
  • Emma Day, ‘The Violent Denial of Healthcare in Modern America,’ Historical Perspectives on Gendered State Violence Digital History Project (July 2023), https://sites.google.com/view/gendered-state-violence/timeline/1968-2020-expansion-of-the-carceral-state.
  • Emma Day, ‘The Fire Inside: Women Protesting AIDS in Prison since 1980,’ Modern American History 5, no. 1 (2022): 79-100.’ 
  • Emma Day, ‘For Health or for Profit: Covid-19 and the History of Big Pharma in the United States,’ Working Papers in Critical Disaster Studies: Historical Approaches to Covid-19, New York University (April 2021), https://s18798.pcdn.co/disasters/wp-content/uploads/sites/16355/2021/03/working-paper-series-day.pdf.
  • Emma Day, ‘The coronavirus is a flimsy excuse to ban abortion: States are using the pandemic to further their long campaign against reproductive rights,’ Washington Post, April 8, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/08/covid-19-is-flimsy-excuse-ban-abortion/.
  • Emma Day, ‘Native Women, AIDS Activism, and the Coatlicue Theatre Company in the United States,’ The Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas, Vol. 71 (2018): 43-61.
  • Emma Day, ‘AIDS and Reproductive Rights in the American Century,’ chapter in Public Health and the American State, ed. Gaetano Di Tommaso, Dario Fazzi, Giles-Scott-Smith (University of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming 2024).
  • Emma Day, Review of Ellen S. More, The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health (New York: New York University Press, 2022) (review in preparation).

Twitter: @DrEmmaDay