Elizabeth Nelson

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1805/26680

Elizabeth Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Health Studies in the School of Liberal Arts at IU, Indianapolis, and an adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies.

Professor Nelson earned a PhD in French History at Indiana University, Bloomington in 2015 and served as the Director of Public Programs at the Indiana Medical History Museum from 2014-2017 before joining the Medical Humanities program in 2018.

Professor Nelson's historical research focuses on rehabilitative institutions, such as mental hospitals and prisons. She explores how people carve out bold and meaningful lives in the most inhospitable spaces. Nelson is currently working on a collaborative book project on the final years and closure of Indiana’s Central State Hospital, inspired by newsletters published by patients with intellectual disabilities in the late 1980s.

Nelson also coordinates the Indiana Women's Prison History Project, a group of currently and formerly incarcerated scholars who are researching the history of prisons for women, eugenics and reproductive justice, and the health and well-being of incarcerated people. She is the co-editor (with Michelle Daniel Jones) of Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 (The New Press, 2023).

At IU Indianapolis, Nelson has offers courses on the History of Medicine, Disability Studies, Black health and mental health from humanities perspectives, and more.

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Recent Submissions

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    Elizabeth Nelson Research Introduction
    (Center for Translating Research Into Practice, IU Indianapolis, 2021-09-24) Nelson, Elizabeth
    Professor Elizabeth Nelson briefly discusses her translational research that deals with her work with the Indiana Women’s Prison History Project. The History Project is a collective of approximately ten student researchers who are either currently or formerly incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison.
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    Review: Black Health and the Humanities
    (PubPub, 2022-10-31) Nelson, Elizabeth; Medical Humanities & Health Studies Program, School of Liberal Arts
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    Medical Racism and Black Health Activism in Indianapolis and Beyond: Learning Modules for Health Professionals
    (2024) Nelson, Elizabeth
    This set of modules, designed for health care professionals, focuses on the history of health disparities in the United States, with a special focus on Indianapolis. Health disparities between different racial and ethnic groups have been documented since the 1800s. Anti-Black racism has played a central role in the making of modern medicine in the US; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., considered discrimination in medicine to be the most “shocking and inhuman” form of racism. Civil Rights activists and Black health care professionals have led efforts to minimize health disparities, in Indianapolis and beyond, over many decades. But there is more work to be done. As we build toward a more equitable future, we would be wise to inform ourselves of this past.
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    Aging With Incarceration Histories: An Intersectional Examination of Incarceration and Health Outcomes Among Older Adults
    (Oxford, 2023-05) Latham-Mintus, Kenzie; Deck, Monica M.; Nelson, Elizabeth; Sociology, School of Liberal Arts
    Objectives Experiences with incarceration are linked to poor mental and physical health across the life course. The purpose of this research is to examine whether incarceration histories are associated with worse physical and mental health among older adults. We apply an intersectionality framework and consider how the intersection of sexism and racism leads to unequal health outcomes following incarceration among women and people of color. Methods We employ 2 measures of health (i.e., number of depressive symptoms and physical limitations) to broadly capture mental and physical health. Using data from Waves 11 and 12 of the Health and Retirement Study, we estimated a series of general linear models to analyze differences in health by incarceration history, gender/sex, and race/ethnicity. Results Findings suggest that experiences with incarceration are associated with a greater number of physical limitations and more depressive symptoms among older men and women, net of sociodemographic characteristics, early-life conditions, and lifetime stressful events. Formerly incarcerated women, particularly women of color, had more physical limitations and depressive symptoms relative to other groups. Discussion These findings suggest that incarceration histories have far-reaching health implications. Older women of color with incarceration histories experience markedly high levels of physical limitations and depressive symptoms in later life.
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    “The Sex Lady Talks”: Disability Rights and the Normalization of Sex in a 1980s Institution
    (2020) Nelson, Elizabeth; Beckman, Emily S.; Labode, Modupe; History, School of Liberal Arts
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    Voices from the Newspaper Club: Patient Life at a State Psychiatric Hospital (1988-1992)
    (Springer, 2020-05-21) Beckman, Emily; Nelson, Elizabeth; Labode, Modupe; Medical Humanities and Health Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of thirty-seven issues of The DDU Review, a newsletter produced by residents of the Dual Diagnosis Unit, a residential unit for people who had diagnoses of developmental disability and serious mental illness in the Central State Hospital (Indiana, USA). The analysis of the newsletters produced between September 1988 and June 1992 revealed three major themes: 1) the mundane; 2) good behavior; and 3) advocacy. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the discourse of medicalization—such as relations with physicians, diagnoses, and medications—receive little attention. Instead, the patient-journalists focus on prosaic aspects of institutional life. The patients used their writing as a form self-definition and advocacy. The authors argue that even though it is tempting to consider the patients’ emphasis on good behavior as evidence of institutional control, internalized discipline, and medicalization, a more nuanced interpretation, which focuses on how the patients’ understood their own experiences, is warranted. Researchers must also recognize the ways in which The DDU Review reveals the patient-journalists’ experience of an institutional life that includes non-medical staff (attendants, secretaries, and therapists), varied social relationships among patients, and negotiated freedoms.
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    The Museum of Madness at the Villejuif Asylum in Paris, Circa 1900
    (2016-02-09) Nelson, Elizabeth
    History of Psychiatry in France, circa 1900s