New Faculty Seminar: Ogechukwu Williams

HI Seminar Room (218 Clemens Hall)

Sitting with the Dead: A Microhistory of Maternal Death through a Single Body 

The history of maternal deaths in Nigeria is often told through numbers: ratios, rates, trends, and targets. Yet, maternal death as lived experience rarely announces itself as a statistic. Based on a chapter in her current book project, Dying to bring Life: A Social History of Maternal Deaths in Nigeria, Williams’ microhistory begins with a body described in an early twentieth-century anthropological report: a deceased pregnant woman seated against a tree, wrapped in green vines, an inverted earthenware pot pressed into the earth beside her. Through this dead figure – translated into a visual image - Williams examines how maternal death has been produced, normalized, ritualized, and obscured across Nigerian history. Reading this body as history reveals maternal death not as inevitable, accidental, or cultural, but as the outcome of decisions about infrastructure, authority, legitimacy, and value. 

Ogechukwu Williams is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in the Department of Global Gender Studies, with a research focus on maternal health and reproduction. She is the author of Birth Politics: Colonial Power, Medical Pluralism, and Maternity in Nigeria with Johns Hopkins University Press. Her research has most recently been supported by the National Library of Medicine, the Gender Institute, and the Humanities Institute. Her publications have appeared in several peer reviewed journals, including Social History of Medicine, Journal of African History, Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, and Africa.