Kirsten Gardner, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Romo Endowed Professor, Distinguished Teaching Professor, History

Kirsten Gardner, Ph.D.

Bio

Spring 2024 Office Hours: TBD.

Kirsten E. Gardner, Associate Professor of History, teaches in the Department of History and serves as affiliated faculty in Women’s Studies and Medical Humanities. She is co-PI of the Democratizing Racial Justice project, a multi-year Mellon-funded initiative (https://racialjustice.utsa.edu/). In 2022, she was named a UTSA Distinguished Teaching Professor, and her teaching awards have included the UT System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Dr. Gardner has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. History, Women and Gender Studies, History of Medicine, Modern U.S. history, Gender and Technology, Research and Writing Practices, and Pedagogy for Historical Thinking. She also teaches study abroad in Urbino, Italy and looks forward to launching a Big Bend Study away program in Spring 2023.

Dr. Gardner earned a B.A. from Georgetown University; an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati; and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on issues of women's health, social justice, technology and healthcare, and women and the military. Early Detection Women, Cancer, and Awareness Campaigns in the Twentieth-Century United States (UNC, 2006) traced women’s activism in early cancer detection campaigns for nearly a century. More recently, her work on the history of diabetes since insulin explores how medical technologies and patient experience have intersected in the past century. Gardner has published her research and work in many journals and edited collections including The Journal of Medical Humanities; Journal of Women's History; Enterprise and Society; Literature and Medicine; Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives; Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America; Artificial Parts and Practical Lives: Modern History of Prosthetics and (Un)Doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture.

Research Interests

  • U.S. History
  • Gender Studies
  • Social History

Honors and Awards

Presentations

Grants, Patents and Clinical Trials

Publications