Kathryn Lankford

Kathryn Lankford is an Assistant Teaching Professor for the faculty of Applied Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies (AHIS) in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts. A historian of medicine by training, she mobilizes interdisciplinary methods to examine the many agents and agendas that shape medical therapies and medical knowledge in the 20th century. She is particularly interested in how medicine intersects with, and is produced by, matters of gender, labor, and empire in the Americas.   

Kathryn is currently expanding her work on the Puerto Rican field trials of contraceptives during the 1950s & 1960s for academic and public audiences. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Routine and Exceptional, centers the everyday experiences of doctors, allied healthcare workers, and participants (those taking emerging contraceptives) in Puerto Rico as they navigated the field trials. She is the director of the digital humanities project, Chronicling the Birth of Contraceptives in Puerto Rico, an open access repository for scholars and the public. Chronicling is homed on H-Net Spaces. 

She has taught a wide range of courses at ASU and elsewhere. They include interdisciplinary and history classes related to science, technology, medicine, gender & sexuality, and the environment. Kathryn has also worked in more "traditional" courses centered on the histories of the United States and Latin America & the Caribbean. Before joining ASU, Kathryn served as an instructor at Lyman Briggs College of Michigan State University and as a pre-health, academic advisor at University of Michigan.