I am a historian of medicine in Africa, with particular emphasis on West Africa. My interest in health and medicine is longstanding, but my passion specifically for maternal health and reproduction began in 2010 when I worked for the National Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS Scheme in Nigeria. This experience exposed me to women’s reproductive health/care challenges and has since shaped my scholarship. Driven by the desire to provide historical backgrounds to current maternal health issues and debates around women’s reproduction, my first book, Birth Politics: Colonial Power, Medical Pluralism, and Maternity in Nigeria, forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press, explores the local, colonial, and contemporary politics of childbirth and how the British colonial government, medical missionaries, Aladura faith healers, traditional midwives, and international population control organizations sought at various times to advance their agendas through contests over birth and motherhood. It is the first comprehensive history of childbirth in Nigeria. My second book project, Dying to Bring Life: A Social History of Maternal Deaths in Nigeria, builds upon the first monograph and uses oral histories, annual medical reports, anthropological reports, newspapers, and legal proceedings to examine the historical contexts of maternal deaths and the ways in which long-standing cultural behaviors and political decisions in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria have impacted maternal deaths since the twentieth century.

Maternal health and reproduction; Midwifery; Birth rituals; Maternal deaths; Medical activism; Wartime medicine; Medical cinema; Religion and medicine; Indigenous knowledge systems; Women’s history