Heather Munro Prescott

Connecticut State University Professor of History

Department of History
208 DiLoreto Hall
Central Connecticut State University
1615 Stanley Street
New Britain, CT 06050

Phone: (860) 832-2809
Fax: (860) 832-2804
Email: prescott@ccsu.edu

Areas of Specialization: History of Medicine and Public Health, U.S. Women’s History, 20th-century U.S. History

Heather Munro Prescott received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Religion, summa cum laude, from the University of Vermont in 1984. She received her M.A. (1989) and Ph.D. (1994) in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. She joined the faculty at CCSU in that year. She has served as co-coordinator of Women’s Studies (1995-99) and chair of the history department (1999-2002). In Fall 2001, she was A. Lindsay O’Connor Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University. In April 2010, upon the recommendation of a Faculty Senate advisory committee and President Jack Miller, the Board of Trustees selected Dr. Prescott as a Connecticut State University Professor.

Dr. Prescott’s teaching interests include recent U.S. history, U.S. women’s history, and the history of medicine and public health. Her research interests include U.S. women’s history, history of childhood, and most recently, disability history. Now that she has completed her second book, Student Bodies: The Impact of Student Health on American Society and Medicine, she begins a new project on the history of emergency contraception. In 2004-05, she held a National Institutes of Health Publication Grant from the National Library of Medicine. In 2005-06, she held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Her first book, A Doctor of Their Own, received the Will Solimene Award of Excellence in Medical Communication from the New England Chapter, American Medical Writers Association.

Visit Dr. Prescott's blog.

Selected Publications:

The Morning After; A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
Student Bodies: The Impact of Student Health on American Society and Medicine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Children and Youth in Sickness and Health: A Historical Handbook and Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004). Co-edited with Janet Golden and Richard Meckel.
"A Doctor of Their Own": The History of Adolescent Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
"The Brith Control Backlash: The Regulation and Marketing of Emergency Contraception in the United States," in Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Pharmaceuticals edited by Vivianne Quirke and Judy A. Slinn, Peter Lang, forthcoming.
"Guides to Womanhood: Gynecology and Adolescent Sexuality in the Post World War II Era," in Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kathryn McPherson, eds., Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945 (Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).
"Using Student Bodies: College and University Students as Research Subjects," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 57 (2002): 3-38.
"’I Was a Teenage Dwarf’: The Social Construction of ’Normal’ Adolescent Growth and Development in Twentieth Century America," in Formative Years: Children’s Health in America, 1880-2000, eds. Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
"The White Plague Goes to College: Tuberculosis Prevention Programs in Colleges and Universities, 1920-1960," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000): 847-884.
"The ’Agrarian Myth’ and Student Health at the University of Pennsylvania." Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, ser. 5, vol. 21 (1999): 87-117.
"Sending Their Sons Into Danger: Cornell University and the Ithaca Typhoid Epidemic of 1903," New York History 78, no. 3 (July 1997): 273-308.