Profile
Nicole Bourbonnais

Nicole BOURBONNAIS

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS
CO-DIRECTOR, GENDER CENTRE
email
Spoken languages
English, French, Spanish
Areas of expertise
  • Civil society, social movements, Trade Unions, NGOs
  • Development, cooperation and aid policies
  • Gender, women and public policies
  • Global health, global health diplomacy, global health governance, medical anthropology
  • Human rights
  • International organisations, UN
  • Redistribution policies, social inequalities, poverty
  • Religion and politics
Geographical Region of Expertise
  • Central America
  • South America

PROFILE

Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute. Her research explores how people’s intimate lives have been shaped by global politics and transnational social activism across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She is the author of two books - Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) - as well as a number of articles/chapters on themes of gender, sexuality, decolonization, maternalism, and global health.  Her current research project traces the history and politics of maternity at the World Health Organization from the 1940s to the present, focusing on four key fields: death (the production of statistics around maternal mortality), birth (evolving guidelines for pregnancy and childbirth), breast (recommendations surrounding infant feeding) and mind (efforts to recognize and address maternal mental health issues). She is also writing a short book on the history and social theory of parenting (under contract with Polity Press).

Dr. Bourbonnais received her BA from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) and MA/PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches courses and supervises theses on the subjects of reproductive politics, global health, decolonization, gender and sexuality, social history, Caribbean history, and oral history.  She is also a podcast host for the New Books Network, where she publishes interviews with authors of recent books on reproduction and sexuality across disciplines.

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

 

Books

Selected articles and chapters (2013 onwards)

  • “Fertility and Fertility Control,” in Isabel Córdova, ed. A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Globalization (1945-present). Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming.
  • “Population and Family Planning,” Oxford Bibliographies in the History of Medicine, Jaclyn Dufflin, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • “ ‘A Grande Causa’: Missionários do Planeamento Familiar no Fim do Império [The ‘Great Cause’: Family Planning Missionaries at the End of Empire,” Ler Historia, No. 85 (2024): 1-2.. [translated to Portuguese by José Pedro Monteiro].
  • “The Intimate Labor of Internationalism: Maternalist Humanitarians and the Mid-20th Century Family Planning Movement,” Journal of Global History 17.3 (November 2022): 515-538.
  • “Contraception and Reproduction in Global Conversation,” Journal of Women’s History 33.4 (Winter 2021): 222-230.
  • “Sexual Hierarchies and Erotic Autonomy: Colonizing and Decolonizing Sex in the Caribbean,” p 30-42 in Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Schields, eds. The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism. London: Routledge, 2021.
  • Co-editor with Marcos Cueto and Davide Rodogno, História, Ciências, Saúde– Manguinhos special issue “The Meaning(s) of Global Public Health History,” 27.1 (September 2020).
  • “Population Control, Family Planning, and Maternal Health Networks in the 1960s/70s: Diary of an International Consultant,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 93.3 (Fall 2019): 335-364.
  • “Our Joan of Arc: Women, Gender, and Authority in the Harmony Division of the UNIA,” in Ronald J. Stephens and Adam Ewing, eds. Global Garveyism: Diasporic Aspirations and Utopian Dreams. University Press of Florida, 2019.
  • “Discrimination in Any Shape or Form: Black Activism and Women’s Rights in Interwar Bermuda,” in K. Natanya Duncan and Reena N. Goldthree, eds.  Caribbean Review of Gender Studies Special Issue: Gender and Anticolonialism in the Interwar Caribbean, 12 (October 2018): 143-168.

Media and Policy Papers

 

 

Nicole Bourbonnais

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