Project
Nursing Clio

Project Leads
Sarah Handley-Cousins, Executive Editor, University of Buffalo
Jacqueline Antonovich, Creator and Executive Editor Emerita, Muhlenberg College
Vicki Daniel, Managing Editor, Case Western Reserve University
RE Fulton, Managing Editor, Nursing Clio

A full list of team members is available on the project site.

Project URL
https://nursingclio.org/

Project Reviewer
Dominique Tobbell, University of Virginia

Project Overview

Sarah Handley-Cousins

In 2012, Jacqueline Antonovich, then a first-year doctoral student at the University of Michigan, conceptualized Nursing Clio. The project was born from a public humanities graduate seminar in which historian Matthew Countryman tasked students with creating a project that not only served the public but engaged communities in a way that fostered a co-production of knowledge. Along with co-founders from five colleges and universities around the country, Antonovich believed that a collaborative blog project like Nursing Clio could provide the space and scaffolding for both scholars and non-academic audiences to contextualize discussions along the intersections of gender, medicine, and sexuality in the past and present. Such a project, the founders believed, was not only intellectually appealing but genuinely necessary. Nursing Clio’s mission statement emphasizes the goal of connecting historical scholarship to contemporary issues related to gender, health, and medicine. Its tagline, “The Personal Is Historical,” added a new and important dimension to the groundbreaking feminist claim that “the personal is political.”

Nursing Clio has since grown to a staff of over 20 volunteer editors from various backgrounds. The editorial team includes tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track professors, public historians and museum educators, and historians working outside of the academy. The contributor base is similarly diverse: Nursing Clio has published essays from over 521 writers, including academic historians, public historians, art historians, sociologists, anthropologists, K-12 teachers, community health activists, and both graduate and undergraduate students. Nursing Clio provides a valuable platform connecting established scholars looking to reach a wide audience and non-academic readers from all backgrounds seeking accessible scholarship on issues that affect them. To empower young writers, the project maintains a long tradition of featuring exceptional essays from undergraduate students across the country, offering them an up-close look at the editing and publishing process in the digital world.

In the 12 years since its founding, Nursing Clio has published over 1,686 essays and has had over one million unique web visits. Nursing Clio has been linked, quoted, and cited in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vogue, The Lancet, Smithsonian Magazine, Vox, Slate, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel — not to mention on CNN, PBS, and WBUR: Boston Public Radio. Nursing Clio essays are included in class syllabi at more than 140 colleges and universities in six countries worldwide. Nursing Clio and individual essays have been cited in journals such as The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The Journal of Medical Ethics, Nursing Inquiry, Birth, and The Journal of World History. Nursing Clio’s first book, a collection of new and updated essays on the topic of reproduction titled The Nursing Clio Reader, will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. We have a strong social media presence, with approximately 10,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and email lists. In an internet-driven age in which scholars grapple with the challenge of harnessing digital tools for academic discourse, Nursing Clio represents the power of the collaborative blog as the vanguard for innovative, forward-facing public scholarship. 

Project Review

Dominique Tobbell

“The Personal is Historical,” reads Nursing Clio’s tagline. This reflects a key approach of the interdisciplinary open-access, peer-reviewed collaborative blog project: integrating personal reflections and historically informed analyses of contemporary issues related to gender, sexuality, health, and medicine. For 12 years, Nursing Clio has published innovative, public-facing historical scholarship that critiques, informs, and reckons with contemporary issues related to gender, health, and medicine. It is led by an editorial team of graduate students and scholars at all career stages from both within and outside of academia, including those in contingent faculty roles. 

In addition to research-based essays, Nursing Clio publishes book reviews, interviews with authors, and features like “Adventures in the Archives,” which seeks to demystify archival research and serves as a space for scholars to reflect upon their own archival encounters. A large number of essays center on topics related to reproductive health and justice. These provide intersectional analyses, foreground the experiences of those historically marginalized within health care, and often include personal narratives of pregnancy loss, obstetric racism, and surviving abuse. Nursing Clio also publishes series focused on specific topics. For example, the “Beyond Florence” series powerfully critiques the place that white nursing leaders like Florence Nightingale have occupied in nursing history, and centers histories of Black, Indigenous, and Filipina nurses. The “Deathbed” series, published during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, explores death and dying across times, places, and cultures, and essays in the “Bites of History” series features histories of food, nutrition, diets, and health. Other essays offer personal reflections and historically informed analysis of activism and protest, both in the past and in the present. While Nursing Clio’s geographic focus is largely North America, many of the contributing essays also engage broader geographies. 

As a platform for feminist digital pedagogy, Nursing Clio also hosts collaboratively produced syllabi on timely topics, such as the Reproduction History Syllabus. This is a broad and inclusive resource for teachers and learners alike, providing citations and hyperlinks to articles, books, and media resources on the history and politics of reproduction before and after Roe. The platform is also transformative, expanding the scholarly enterprise and historical knowledge itself beyond just those with academic training in history to include health care workers, community activists, public historians, K12 educators, and undergraduate students. The essays, which are well-researched and engagingly written, are shorter and more accessible than academic journal articles. As such, the essays are effective for teaching and engaging students and those outside of academia about the history and contemporary manifestations of misogyny, paternalism, trans- and homophobia, ableism, and racism in health care. Nursing Clio’s impact is evident in the breadth of scholarly, pedagogical, and media venues in which its essays are cited, quoted, and used. The website enables searching for essays by keywords or by series category. The “Authors” webpage, accessed from the “About” tab, provides brief bios about contributing writers, and clicking on a specific writer will direct the reader to all essays contributed by that author. 

The editorial team is already working to expand its pedagogical offerings, with The Nursing Clio Reader forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. Further opportunities for growth include the creation of new collaborative syllabi, for example, on topics such as the history of LGTBTQ+ health. Another future direction, which Nursing Clio is already undertaking through its Writers-in-Residence program, is to expand the blog’s geographic foci to include histories of gender and medicine in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Finally, given how prominent the history of disability is among the essays, it would be beneficial to include “Disability” among the blog’s topical categories.   

Ultimately, Nursing Clio embodies public scholarship that is creative, collaborative, and robust. It provides accessible, historically informed analyses of contemporary issues of gender, health, and medicine. Nursing Clio is a needed and timely intervention, especially in the context of the dismantling of reproductive rights, the intensified assault on transgender rights and lives, and the persistence of racial disparities in maternal health.