The Physician, the Jury, and the Corpse: Investigating infant Death in Nineteenth-Century America

An Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University since 2013, Felicity Turner received her PhD in history from Duke University in 2010. Her research has been supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University, Bloomington; the University of Wisconsin Law School; and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. In addition, Turner has received funding from the Newberry Library; the Illinois State Historical Society; the North Caroliniana Society; the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation of the American Society for Legal History; and an Albert J. Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association.

In 2015, Dr. Turner received the Coordinating Council for Women in History’s Nupur Chaudhuri Award for best first article by a member of the association for “Rights and the Ambiguities of Law: Infanticide in the Nineteenth-Century US South” published in the Journal of the Civil War Era in September 2014. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Bodies of Knowledge: Narratives of Infanticide in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Drawing upon inquests, court cases, newspapers, and medical literature about infanticide and infant death from across the nation, Bodies of Knowledge traces transformations in ideas about the human body from the Revolution to Reconstruction.

This event is co-sponsored by Duke's Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies.