Episode 146: Thelma and Louise with Jacki Antonovich and Lauren MacIvor Thompson
This week we return to the vault to bring you Ridley Scott's unexpected western masterpiece: Thelma and Louise.
Dr. Jacqueline Antonovich a historian of health and medicine in the United States, with particular interests in how race, gender, and politics shape the medical field and access to health care. Her teaching interests include histories of public health, alternative medicine, disability, reproduction and childbirth, and epidemics. She also focuses on the history of the American West, nineteenth-century America, and the Gilded and Progressive Eras.
Her recent publications include "White Coats, White Hoods: The Medical Politics of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s America," which received Honorable Mention at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for "Best Article in the Field of The History of Women, Gender, and/or Sexuality," and "Feminist Doctors and Medicine Women: The Lady Physician in the American Western," in Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Period Drama." Currently, she is working on a book with Rutgers University Press, focusing on the history of women physicians and their political activism in the early twentieth century. She is also the creator and executive editor emerita of Nursing Clio, an online journal connecting historical scholarship to present-day issues of gender, health, and medicine. Her research and teaching have been featured in The Washington Post, BBC, Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, and the podcast Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.
Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of reproductive health, women's rights, and the law. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University and also serves as the faculty fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law's Center for Law, Health, and Society.
Her book, Rivals and Rights: The Politics of Contraception and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press in 2025. She has published numerous academic articles and op-eds including work in Law and History Review, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Society for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, among others. Thompson is also a frequent public speaker, including presentations at the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, as well as national and international symposiums on suffrage and legal rights, reproduction, health, and medicine. She is a member of the national Scholars Strategy Network.