Lisa Cody
I am a cultural historian who works on the history of the human body, including abortion, reproduction, sexuality, gender, and violence across the Atlantic and Northern European worlds. My publications and research explore the history of the family, the law, medicine, literary and visual representations, and social conflict.
I am the recipient of numerous prizes for her academic articles and first monograph, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons.
My current book projects are Between the Sheets: Sex and Secrets in Eighteenth-Century English Marriage and How Abortion Became an American Obsession. My most recent refereed article appears in the October 2022 Journal of British Studies on the history of marital rape.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and currently serve as an elected board member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and am the treasurer of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies. Past posts include the American Historical Association and the Pacific-AHA, serving on scholarly prize and fellowship committees and editorial boards. I was appointed by the Governor of California to serve on the California State Bar's Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission (2018-2021) and have served as History Department Chair and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Claremont McKenna College.
Supervisors: Thomas Laqueur, David Lieberman (deceased), Susanna Barrows (deceased), and Jack Pressman (deceased)
I am the recipient of numerous prizes for her academic articles and first monograph, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons.
My current book projects are Between the Sheets: Sex and Secrets in Eighteenth-Century English Marriage and How Abortion Became an American Obsession. My most recent refereed article appears in the October 2022 Journal of British Studies on the history of marital rape.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and currently serve as an elected board member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and am the treasurer of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies. Past posts include the American Historical Association and the Pacific-AHA, serving on scholarly prize and fellowship committees and editorial boards. I was appointed by the Governor of California to serve on the California State Bar's Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission (2018-2021) and have served as History Department Chair and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Claremont McKenna College.
Supervisors: Thomas Laqueur, David Lieberman (deceased), Susanna Barrows (deceased), and Jack Pressman (deceased)
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As a chapter in my monograph about the long eighteenth century, this discussion of Toft analyzes how "maternal imagination" changed in meaning during the period. Toft marks an important transformation in the conception of female bodies and psychologies, in her own day, seen as powerful and passionate, but in later years, as weak, credulous, and typical of female irrationality.
A forthcoming essay in the American Historical Association's Perspectives Newsletter ("Essentialism in Context," Jan. 2016) references this chapter's material on Charles White and his "An Account of the Regular Gradation of Man" (1799).