About

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 during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As a Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, she earned her PhD in the History of Science. She was then a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from various institutions, including the American Council for Learned Societies, the American Association for University Women, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Commission on Women and Gender Studies, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

Her writing has appeared in Social History of Medicine (2026), The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice (Rutgers University Press, 2025), the Nursing Clio blog, and is forthcoming in History of Psychiatry (2027) and edited volumes published by Bloomsbury Publishing (2026) and Cambridge University Press (2028). 

Dr. Okwandu is also in the process of becoming a certified doula through DONA International, providing her with a firsthand perspective on the practices, challenges, and community dynamics of contemporary birth work. It also reflects her ongoing commitment to applying her writing, communication, and research skills beyond the academy. From 2025-2026, she served as a Historical Consultant for the documentary film LIMITLESS: The Dr. Chester Pierce Story, in which she is also featured. Since 2024, she has served as an editor for Nursing Clio,  an open access, peer-reviewed blog that bridges historical scholarship and current issues in gender and medicine.

From 2021-2023, she was an Anti-Racist Science Education Project Fellow at LabXChange,  a free, digital science education platform that serves over 10 million learners and educators worldwide. In this role, she designed curriculum on topics such as the historical formation of race, the history of scientific and medical racism, health disparities, and evidence-based strategies that educators can use to promote the success of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and low-income students. She also partnered with Ancestry, the largest geneaology company in the world, as a Creative and Content Consultant from 2020-2023. Finally, from 2020-2021, she served as a Research Historian for the HistoryMakers – a non-profit research organization that preserves the untold stories of Black Americans in collaboration with the Library of Congress.