Rana A. Hogarth (University of Illinois, Urbana), “Deliberate Acts and Desperate Measures: (Mis)Perceptions of Dirt Eating on Jamaican Plantations” (Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World)

Rana A. Hogarth focuses on the medical and scientific constructions of race during the era of slavery and beyond. Her first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017. In it, she examine how white physicians “medicalized” blackness— a term she uses to describe the process by which white physicians defined blackness as a medically  significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic.