Rana Hogarth is an associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science. Her research focuses on the creation of ideas about racial difference in North America and the Caribbean as they emerged through the language of medicine and its allied fields. She is the author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which examines how white physicians defined blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic.
Her work has appeared in Social History of Medicine, American Quarterly, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, American Journal of Public Health, and History Compass. She served as the historical consultant for the NEH funded project Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race, a Distillations podcast and magazine, that launched February 2023 by the Science History Institute. She is at work on her second book, which examines how the American Civil War, and slavery and its afterlives shaped the development of scientific opinions about the eugenic fitness of Black and mixed-race people in the Americas.
Penn & Slavery Project 