Congratulations to Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor of History, on the publication of the co-edited volume Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (University of Nebraska Press). Armstrong-Partida’s collaborators are Alexandra Guerson (University of Toronto) and Dana Wessell Lightfoot (University of Norther British Columbia). The twelve-essay collection features groundbreaking work on the lives of women from a range of socioeconomic and religious positions in premodern Iberian societies. Elizabeth S. Cohen, Professor Emerita at York University, writes that “This well-conceived volume gathers and fruitfully juxtaposes fresh material from many sites and communities and provides an entrée into the specialized research of a rich range of scholars.”  Read more about Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia on the University of Nebraska page.

Dr. Kylie Smith, a historian at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, has published Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing with Rutgers University Press. Five years in the making, Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of “mental health,” and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today.