Livres publiés / Books
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2021
Bad Brains analyzes the contemporary legacies of health classifications, routines and practices in mental health clinics and psychiatric hospitals today. The book looks at how psychiatric treatments targeting African-American populations have evolved following the Great Migration, until the 21st-century.
Louisiana University Press, Baton Rouge, 2022. Jules and Landry Award for 2023.
Mad with Freedom explores the long-abiding history of differential treatments and access to psychiatric care for African American patients in the US, from the 19th century to the early 20th century. The book uncovers the history of psychiatric institutions that treated white and African American patients separately in the U.S. South, and more specifically in Virginia, North Carolina and Louisiana.
Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 2026
The book is co-authored with historian Delphine Peireitti-Courtis and explores the past and present legacies of medical racism and racial science. The book shows how racial science spread in scientific circles in the 19th century, before being ostracized in the mid-20th century. Despite this ostracization, racial science beliefs still circulate in our contemporary society through popular science platforms and online hate groups. The book shows how these diverse social actors seek to rehabilitate disqualified 19th-century racial science while devising targeted, ideological attacks against contemporary conceptions of race as an environmental variable and/or social construct.