Professor Dana Landress has joined the Department of History as an Assistant Professor of Medical History and Bioethics. She is a historian of 19th and 20th century medicine and public health in the United States. Her research examines the relationship between nutritional disease, community health work, and the political economy of capitalism in the U.S. South. Methodologically, her research blends the approaches and insights of social history, labor history, and oral history. She is especially interested in histories of structural racism, economic inequality, and community health activism as they pertain to patient encounters with medicine and public health. Additionally, she studies histories of southern foodways, diasporic culinary traditions, and medicinal remedies of the rural South. Currently, she is at work on two projects. The first is a multidisciplinary collaboration with scholars, activists, and health providers to document community healthcare work in the wake of Covid-19. The second is a book project detailing the history of pellagra in the U.S. South.
She has taught History of Science/MedHist 509 – The Development of Public Health in America and will be teaching History of Science 360 – Health Inequalities in the Long 20th Century in Fall 2023.