Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu is a historian, educator, writer, and public speaker.

Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research examines how race and gender have shaped medical knowledge and practice in the United States since the nineteenth century, with a focus on the enduring reproductive and psychiatric health inequities affecting Black women. Her first book project, Madness and Motherhood in Black and White: A History of Race, Maternal Mental Illness, and Diagnostic Privilege in U.S. Medicine, investigates how psychiatric understandings of maternal madness helped produce racialized hierarchies of motherhood and unequal forms of diagnostic recognition.