UCSB Homepage UCSB History Department Homepage Sign In

Jill Briggs

Announcements

There are no announcements

History of Science, Medicine and Technology


Ph.D Candidate
M.A. UCSB, M.A.T. Univeristy of San Diego, B.A. UCLA

Advisor: Gabriela Soto Laveaga

I am deeply interested in the outcomes of interactions between science and society. My dissertation examines the development of a 'modern programme of public health' in Jamaica from 1918 to 1944 and its connections to the nationalist movement which gained strength in the late 1930s. In particular, I am interested in how middle-class and elite reformers and medical authorities constructed the Afro-Jamaican poor as a population that was diseased and uncontrolled in their sexual and reproductive behaviors, and therefore unfit for self-governance.

Dissertation Title

  • Colonialism, Public Health and the Making of the Jamaican National Body

Teaching Fields

  • History of Science and Medicine: Ancient to Modern
  • Modern World History
  • History of British Empire
  • Caribbean History

Courses Taught

  • HIST 107C- Darwinian Revolution and Modern Biology
    Summer 2011
  • HIST 126- American Women in History
    Fall 2006, Winter 2007 University of San Diego

Teaching Assistantships

  • Black Studies 5- Blacks in Western Civilization
    Fall 2010
  • HIST 17C- United States 1917-present
    Spring 2010, Winter 2009, Spring 2011
  • HIST 2B- World History 1000-1700
    Winter 2010
  • HIST 4C- Western Civilization 1700-present
    Fall 2009, Spring 2009, Fall 2008
  • HIST 4B- Western Civilization 1000-1700
    Winter 2008
  • HIST 2C- World History 1700-present
    Spring 2008
  • HIST 4A- Western Civilization
    Fall 2007
  • HIST 17B- American History to World War I
    Winter 2011

Publications

Awards

  • Arizona State University and National Science Foundation Embryo Project Training Fellow
    2012
  • Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship
    2012
  • Rockefeller Archive Center, Grant-In-Aid
    2010, 2011
  • ISBER Collaborative Student Research Grant, University of California, Los Angeles
    2010
  • History Associates Fellowship University of California, Santa Barbara
    2008, 2010, 2011

Scholarly Presentations

  • Eugenics and American Embryology
    History of Science Society Annual Meeting, November 2012
  • Black Bodies, White Plague: The Jamaican Tuberculosis Vaccine Program (1930-1944)”
    Porter Fortune History Symposium at the University of Mississippi. March 2012
  • Venereal Disease in 1930s Jamaica: Moral Panic and a Case of Mistaken Identity
    Association for Caribbean Historians, 43rd Annual Conference, May 15, 2011
  • "As fool proof as possible": Overpopulation, Colonial Demography and the Jamaica Birth Control League
    American Historical Association, 125th Annual Conference, January 8, 2011
  • “Jamaica Advancing”?: The Rockefeller Tuberculosis Commission and the Tensions Between Research and Eradication”
    Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies, 57th Annual Conference April 10, 2010

Professional Information