Dr. Heather Adams

Dr. Heather Adams (English) received a Distinguished Paper Award for “Of Epidemics and Epideictics: Blaming and Rehabilitating Pregnant Teens in the Late 1970s” at the 2019 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium. Dr. Adams’s research performs feminist historiography of the recent past and investigates rhetorics of reproduction, pregnancy, and motherhood in relation to affect, gender, race, and class. Her book project, “Rhetorics of Shame: A Recent History of Righteous Reproduction explores rhetorical shaming and blaming practices, both private and public, that have shaped—and that continue to shape—discussions of women’s reproduction and sexual wellbeing. Dr. Adams’s scholarly and pedagogical interests also include rhetorics of health and medicine; visual rhetorics; ethnographic methods; decolonial and intersectional theories; and undergraduate research.