Scholarship and Biography
Wangui Muigai is a historian of medicine and science whose research focuses on health, race, and gender in the United States.
Her first book, Perilous Passages: Black Infant Death in America (Harvard University Press, 2027), charts the long history of infant mortality through the perspective of Black mothers and their communities. Uncovering the deep roots of one of the most enduring racial inequalities, it details the maternal knowledge, intimate care practices, and political campaigns Black communities developed to safeguard infant life and to care for the dead. Through these endeavors, Black families navigated transformations in medicine and society that reduced some threats to infant survival, reconfigured others, and introduced new harms that continue to animate struggles for racial and reproductive justice.
Muigai’s second book project bridges histories of health and bioethics by examining when, where, and under what conditions Black women have placed their trust in health care. Research for this project is supported by a multi-year fellowship from the Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics.
Named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for her work “that addresses important and enduring issues confronting our society,” Muigai’s scholarship has been recognized with awards and grants from the American Association for the History of Medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study among other institutions. She joined the Brandeis faculty in 2017 as the Florence Levy Kay postdoctoral fellow in “Race, Science, and Society,” and in 2019 was jointly appointed in the departments of History and African and African American Studies, and as a core faculty member of the Health: Science, Society, and Policy program. The 2021 recipient of the Michael L. Walzer ‘56 Award for Teaching her popular courses explore the histories of race and health, medical activism, childhood, and the body.