She recounts how the works of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Cathy Cohen provided her with the essential tools to articulate and understand her place in the world. Henry's academic trajectory, marked by an MA in the History of Science and Medicine and a P.h.D. in American Studies, highlights the integration of Black studies into her teaching and research. Her current project, “Racing the Life Course: Black Histories of U.S. Child Development Science, 1830s – 1980s,” delves into the intersections of race and developmental science, reflecting a broader commitment to exploring and challenging the temporalities and implications of antiblackness. Henry’s reflections offer valuable insights into how African American Studies continues to shape and enrich her academic and professional life.

Can you share what initially motivated you to pursue African American Studies, and how this field has influenced your academic and professional development?

My first encounter with African American Studies was by way of Black feminist theory. As a Black, queer undergrad, I found life-sustaining introductions to myself and the world – and a language for speaking myself into the world – in the works of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Cathy Cohen. I recognized the value of Black feminist thought for making intellectually sharp, politically urgent, and personally resonant interventions in the communities I inhabited. When I went back to school for my MA in the History of Science and Medicine and my P.h.D. in American Studies, integrating theoretical scholarship from Black studies also became vital to the way I taught African American history alongside histories of science and medicine. When teaching “Sickness and Health in African American History” course, I infused discussions with the insights of Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe to help students historicize contemporary social determinants of health within the context of slavery’s afterlives. Doing so gave them incisive frameworks for connecting histories of medical and sexual violence under enslavement to ongoing racial disparities in Black infant and maternal mortality. 

Interpretive frameworks from African American Studies, especially those about temporalities of antiblackness, have been especially influential on my research. My current book project, “Racing the Life Course: Black Histories of U.S. Child Development Science, 1830s – 1980s,” is a prehistory of “developmental disability” as a racial category. In it, I explore the role that medical and behavioral science has played in authorizing linkages between Blackness and developmental disorder – a linkage that I argue is integral to the language and logic of antiblack racism in the United States. More specifically, I study the durability of nineteenth-century scientific theories of Black developmental incapacity - theories used to justify chattel slavery - in twentieth-century developmental psychology, child psychiatry, and pediatric science. One of my primary arguments is that child development science continued to disenfranchise Black Americans from the human life course in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To make this argument, I rely on Black studies scholarship (Frank B. Wilderson III, Rinaldo Walcott, Tyrone Palmer, alongside Hartman, Spillers, and Sharpe) that positions enslavement as an interminable event that continues to collapse Black time, space, and chronology in the U.S. This scholarship encourages us to view an analytic of time, and the capacity to be affected by the passage of time, as essential for the making of a racially liberated subject. These works have helped me think about the role of structural antiblackness in stymying scientific revolutions; for example the total paradigm shift of how “development” is still often conceived as an exclusive property of whiteness and how this “development” is conceptualized in science and medicine. The works have also proved invaluable for making sense of child development science as an evidentiary hub that has played a part in equating Blackness with embodied temporalities of developmental delay, stasis, and retrogression – equations with ramifying and often violent sociopolitical effects. 

 Looking back on your academic journey, is there a particular moment or experience that you feel was especially transformative?

 As an undergrad at Wesleyan, I was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is a pipeline program that supports minoritized students who are pursuing academic careers. Wes’s MMUF program did something really special with the Fellows; the summer between our sophomore and junior years, all the Fellows lived communally while also taking research and writing practicums together. I had never been in an intentional learning and living community that exclusively centered BIPOC students, one that was vibrant and vulnerable and nerdy and ambitious all at once. I felt at home and it was the first time I felt confident I could build a home and nurture a life for myself in academia. This certainty has ebbed and flowed considerably for me over the years, but those initial sparks of home that I felt in MMUF, and the continued connections and holistic support I have with other fellows, has buoyed me tremendously. 

What aspects of Princeton University and its academic environment attracted you, and what are you most looking forward to as you join our community?

 When I accepted the offer to join Princeton’s Society of Fellows, I was really drawn to the promise of being rooted in an African American Studies Department. Although my work is grounded in Black Studies, I’ve never been formally housed in a Black Studies department or program before. I’m looking forward to the ways my work can grow in an interdisciplinary community of thinkers who are using varied methods to ask questions about structural antiblackness,the diasporic sprawl,and heterogeneous expression of Black life. I’ve also heard phenomenal things about the students in AAS, namely their commitment to refusing siloed intellectualism that is divorced from political engagement. I was disturbed to learn that several students in AAS were arrested last spring while protesting Princeton University’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And I could not be prouder to learn that AAS students are applying what they are learning about the interconnectedness of global systems of oppression to further solidarity efforts with the Palestinian people in their own communities and beyond them. I was also heartened to see how many graduating seniors wore keffiyehs at their graduation and was comforted to see these pictures posted on the AAS homepage. African American Studies is a field borne out of political struggle and constant agitation for more just worlds. I feel honored to join a department that seems values aligned with the political commitments of our field historically.

Your research covers various topics within African American Studies. What do you see as the most critical or emerging issues within this field today?

 Although this tension is not a new one, the conflict between “Black optimism” and “Afropessimism,” or the question of how to account for what Jared Sexton describes as Black “life after or in the social death of slavery,” remains an enduring one that poses methodological and conceptual challenges to many of my colleagues and friends in Black studies. In my work, many of my historical actors – mostly Black developmental psychologists in the 1970s and 1980s -   grappled with some version of this question. Many of the clinicians and social scientists who founded the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development in the 1970s were inspired by the African psychology movement. They were tired of the “damage hypothesis” espoused by 1950s and 1960s social scientists like Kenneth B. Clark, which focused on the psychological harms of antiblackness on the emotional and personality development of Black children. They did not want to reduce Black psychology to an adaptive response to white supremacy, but they were constantly faced with the reality that Black psychic life could not unfold autonomously from and impervious to structural antiblackness. For them, “Black optimist” desires for Black psychic autonomy were tempered by Afropessimist demands for social scientific knowledge about Black children that attended to the psychologization of antiblackness to clinically intervene and shape social policy. As the historian telling this story, I am also balancing desires of my own to tell a thorough diagnostic history of how antiblackness has circumscribed scientific methods and imaginaries in child development science since the nineteenth-century and how/why Black developmental scientists still sought to reform the field to advance racially liberatory aims.  

 I am really captivated by recent works at the nexus of Black Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), particularly writings by Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Katherine McKittrick, Britt Rusert, and AAS’s own Ruha Benjamin. These thinkers are asking novel questions about the scientific knowledge production that is already embedded in and enacted through Black artistic and cultural production. They are also posing urgent questions about why Americans have used science to measure human worth and hierarchize human life, while also telling politically instructive stories about the benefits and drawbacks of turning to science  in the form of citizen science, decolonial science, etc., to dismantle or disprove social hierarchies. I’m also really excited about new works in Black childhood studies, including Habiba Ibrahim’s Black Age and Camille Owens’ Like Children. Both texts advance exciting conversations in Black studies about age and development as understudied yet vital analytic categories for understanding histories of Blackness and antiblack racism in the United States.

In what ways do you anticipate your research will impact both scholarly discussions and societal debates?

 In terms of scholarly impact, my current book project makes primary interventions in histories of science and medicine, disability studies, and Black studies. It poses a historiographic corrective to histories of child development science that typically relegate the field’s racial foundations to a footnote. My argument isthat theories and practices of child development have consistently doubled as theories and practices of race and racialization and must be historicized as such. My work also breaks new ground in disability history, insofar as it rewrites histories of developmental disability as a distinctly racial category. Steering conversations in Black studies toward new evidentiary sources, I argue that scientific theories of Black developmental disorder have been an incredibly durable medium for withholding human recognition and legal personhood from Black Americans. Though more broadly, I am also telling a story about the role that science plays in adjudicating ethical claims about human worth, and subsequently, the downstream effects of scientific beliefs as they shape our social worlds and inform “non-scientific” systems and structures. My research shows that the systematic exclusion of Black children from foundational studies of “normal” development, and how Black racial estrangement from developmental norms by result, has maintained and authorized the exclusion of Black children from “childhood” as a protected human category. I firmly believe that epistemological neglect facilitates real world harm. From Emmett Till to Tamir Rice, Black children are perceived as older than they are and are killed for this. I am hoping to influence conversations about Black children, carceral violence, and “adultification bias” – a conversation largely focused on police brutality and the school-to-prison pipeline – by directing attention toward child development science as an authoritative actor in the violent disenfranchisement of Black children from the human life course. 

Could you discuss any specific research projects or scholarly initiatives you aim to pursue or expand upon during your time at Princeton?

In addition to revising my dissertation into a book manuscript, I am working on a couple of article-length projects. One of them explores the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development and its policy-level influence on dispatching mental health services to families affected by the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I recently found archival evidence that Margaret Beale Spencer, then Caucus chair and Psychology professor at Emory University, collaborated with James Baldwin when he was writing about the murders in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. I am curious about what this collaboration entailed and what it modeled; recalling my previous statement on the bridge work between Black social scientists and Black writers working and thinking in the nexus of violence and Black childhood. The other looks at attempts to standardize examiner affect and subdue child emotion to extract more precise data from children’s bodies in early twentieth-century child anthropometry. This article will further scholarship on scientific effects and the centrality of emotions to human subject research. I’m also excited to get involved with Princeton University Center for Human Values’ Future Values Initiative, co-organized by Professors Catherine Clune-Taylor and M.J. Crockett. Future Values facilitates working partnerships between scientists and humanists to elevate questions about social inequities and applied ethics in scientific knowledge production. I want to develop the translational dexterity necessary to produce histories of race and child development science with applied value for scientists, clinicians, and Black families and I’m eager to be in more spaces that challenge disciplinary siloes in service of aligning social justice with scientific practice. Lastly, I’m really looking forward to mentoring students who are asking questions about race, disability, and aging, especially with influences in science, medicine, and technology.

How have your previous experiences and any fellowships or awards you’ve received influenced your research and academic growth?

Early in graduate school I attended Ischia Summer School, a history of the life sciences summer school held on Ischia,an island off of the coast of Naples, Italy(well known to Elena Ferrante fans!). The theme that year was “Life and Death.” I was given an opportunity to study the history of biology, specifically the scalability,or lack thereof, between how biologists and medical scientists have thought about aging at the cellular and molecular level in tandem with the aging of individuals and populations. This experience pushed me to think more deeply about development as a multi-scalar phenomenon that could be applied to bodies, cities, populations, and nations, which broadened how I approached my work on Black “under/development” as a primary idiom through which antiblackness finds expression in the modern world. A research fellowship from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine allowed me to access archives with especially strong collections in the history of race, science, and medicine. These collections are invaluable to my current book project. And the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship generously gifted me a year in which I got to focus exclusively on writing, For that, I am eternally grateful.

As someone deeply engaged in public scholarship, how do you view the role of academics in influencing public discourse and policy, and how do you fulfill this role in your own work?

I am really invested in public scholarship as an exercise in translation, or accessible storytelling. For the past four years I have co hosted the Disability History Association’s podcast. We strive to produce content that is accessible to a non-academic audience, that could also be used as a teaching aid by high school history teachers who want to infuse their curricula with disability perspectives, and for disabled listeners/readers/viewers. When we interview historians about their latest works, most of which were written for an academic audience, we strive to isolate major takeaways in a digestible audio format that is approachable. We also publish written transcripts of our episodes to provide more than one medium of entry into the conversation. To me, taking on the translational work of public scholarship is an ethical prerogative that animates my commitment to disability studies as a practice, paradigm, and pedagogy. To generate disability studies content that is inaccessible in its delivery undermines the political commitments of a field born out of struggles for access. 

As a historian of race and science, I am also constantly thinking about the use of scientific and medical histories for scientists and clinicians today. I write about the historical entrenchment of racial biases in scientific paradigms and practices to interrupt their reproduction in the present, given that Black families and clinicians continue to interact with these metrics today. I want to produce an applied history that encourages clinicians to question the racial parameters and premises that are embedded in their own evaluative tools for assessing developmental normalcy. In terms of concrete action steps, in order toactualize these desires, I am working on a popular article (that I will likely pitch to Ebony or Parents magazine) that translates some of my work for a general audience of Black parents. I also recently joined the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development to broaden opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration with social scientists and clinical practitioners who work directly with Black families. As a historian, I am always thinking about archives, archive-making, and institutional memory. By keeping a record and telling stories about the complicated racial history of child development science, I hope that my work might help facilitate scientific and political communities across timethat are stronger for their exchange of cross-generational knowledge.

What teaching goals do you have for your courses, and what key takeaways do you hope your students will gain?

 In the fall, I am teaching a course called “Black Disability Studies, Black Disability Histories.” One of my primary goals is to introduce students to Black disability studies as an emerging field while also introducing them to field-defining questions in disability studies writ large. I will encourage students to think critically about “Black disability” as a mutable category that is historically contingent and place-specific, with plural meanings in any given time and place (e.g. “Black disability” as a source of political identity and pride and as an outcome of state violence and medical neglect). We will consider the material, lived realities faced by Black disabled people and contend with “disability” as a metaphor that has naturalized the expendability of Black life in the US, usually through attributions of Black child likeness, dependency, insanity, and intellectual underdevelopment (i.e. ableist logics). We will also ask how centering Black life transforms stories we can tell and the histories we can recover about dis/ability, access, and care over time. As a disability studies scholar and historian of aging and the life course, my classes encourage students to consider age, ageism, and ableism as vitally important for analyzing and intervening in more familiar “isms” (e.g. racism, heterosexism, etc.) My teaching is driven by a core conviction that expanding our analytical frameworks to account for disability and lives across the life course is fundamental to collective liberation.

Outside of your professional work, what personal interests or activities do you engage in that help you maintain balance and fulfillment in your life?

 I’ve been doing a big astrology deep dive – listening to podcasts, reading books, learning about different astrological traditions, timing techniques, the history of astrology’s rise and fall as a “real” science, etc. I love immersing myself in unfamiliar cosmologies and familiarizing myself with new ways of making sense of the world, myself, and other people. I’ve often been on the receiving end of astrological knowledge that has felt intuitively “right” and resonant, so I’ve gotten curious about it as an (oft maligned, yet popularly embraced - at least by some) knowledge system. I am a big horror movie fan – especially wilderness horror, sci-fi horror, and anything about the existential terrors of motherhood. This summer ( 2024), I am also exploring some new movement practices (kickboxing and aerial), finally scratching the itch to learn more about herbalism/plant-based medicine, and getting involved with the Crown Heights C.A.R.E. Collective, a mutual aid and abolitionist group in my Brooklyn neighborhood.