University of Rochester’s Brianna Theobald Wins Two Book Awards

Brianna Theobald, an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester has won two awards for her first book, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). She is the recipient of the John C. Ewers Award from the Western History Association, which is given annually for the best-published book on the North American Indian ethnohistory.

Professor Theobald also won the Armitage-Jameson Prize from the Coalition for Western Women’s History. This award honors an outstanding monograph or edited volume, published in the history of western women, gender, and sexuality.

Dr. Theobald’s book traces the history of reproductive health care and reproductive politics on reservations during the last century, including the notorious sterilizations that occurred in the 1970s when U.S. doctors sterilized an estimated 25 to 42 percent of Native American women of childbearing age, some as young as 15.

Dr. Theobald is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled Safe Haven: Feminisms and the Domestic Violence Movement. She holds a Ph.D. from Arizona State University.