MEET DR. RANA HOGARTH: 2022 KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Rana Hogarth is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research focuses on the creation of ideas about racial difference in North America and the Caribbean as they emerged through the language of medicine and its allied fields. She is the author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which examines how white physicians defined blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. Her other publications appear in History Compass, Social History of Medicine, American Quarterly, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, the American Journal of Public Health and in the edited volume Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher Willoughby (LSU Press, 2021).
Read more about Medicalizing Blackness and Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery
MEET LINDA VILLAROSA: 2022 KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Linda Villarosa is a journalist, professor, and educator. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where she covers race, inequality and health. Her 2018 cover story, "Why America's Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis," was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Her 2017 article, "America's Hidden HIV Epidemic," won a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists' award for Excellence in Journalism. That organization inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2020. Her essay on medical myths was included in the New York Times's 1619 Project in August 2019 and is published in the 1619 Project Book which came out in November 2021. She covered the toll Covid-19 has taken on black communities in America and the environmental justice movement in Philadelphia in 2020 and wrote about life expectancy in Chicago in 2021.
For several years, she edited the health pages for the New York Times, working on health coverage for Science Times and for the newspaper at large. She was also the executive editor of Essence Magazine.
She has won awards from The American Medical Writers’ Association, The Arthur Ashe Institute, Lincoln University, the New York Association of Black Journalists, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association and the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.
She is the author or co-author of three books, including Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being, Passing for Black, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, and a forthcoming book Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, which will be published in June 2022 by Doubleday.
A graduate of the University of Colorado, she also spent a year at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as a journalism fellow. She went back to school several years ago and graduated with a master’s degree in urban journalism/digital storytelling in 2013 from CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
She is an associate professor and journalist in residence at her alma mater CUNY J School, and she also teaches reporting, writing and Black Studies at The City College of New York in Harlem. She has been honored to train journalists from around the world to better cover the HIV/AIDS epidemic at the International AIDS conferences in Barcelona, Bangkok, Toronto, Mexico City, Vienna, Melbourne and Durban. For two summers, she served as a nonfiction mentor for the Lambda Literary Foundation's Emerging Writers Retreat.