Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies
Boston College
West Roxbury, Massachusetts
Martin Summers is a professor of history and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. He has particular research and teaching interests in race, gender, sexuality, and medicine. He is the author of Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900 – 1930 (2004) and the coeditor of Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (2014). Summers’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center. His most recent book, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital (2019), received the Cheiron Society’s prize for outstanding monograph in the history of behavioral and social sciences. Summers is currently working on a book, Inner City Blues: African American Mental Health and the “Urban Crisis” in Twentieth-Century Chicago, which examines how social scientists, psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers, government officials, and community activists understood the relationship between urbanization and mental illness and consequently sought to address the mental healthcare needs of African Americans in so-called ghettoes.
Thursday, November 9, 2023
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM CST
