AECY Hosts Symposium for Senior Undergraduates to Share their Scholarship on the History and Afterlives of Eugenics
Tara*, a Yale graduate of the class of 2025, writes about the senior symposium hosted by the AECY, where she and 3 other students shared their original scholarship on the history and afterlives of eugenics.
Tara Bhat (she/her/hers) is a recent Yale Graduate who studied Political Science.
Pictured Left to Right: Dominique Romain, Tara Bhat, Mayah Monthrope, Sarah Shapiro, and Daniel Martinez HoSang
On April 30, 2025, four Yale students whose senior theses focused on varying aspects of the history of eugenics presented their work.
For the past year, students Yakeleen Almazán, Mayah Monthrope, Dominique Romain, Sarah Shapiro, and I worked together to support each other through the process of conducting original research, digging through various archives, and writing essays on our chosen topics related to eugenics. We formed an “anti-eugenics” research working group and met to discuss both the progress of our work and the complexities of working with a subject matter that can sometimes feel heavy.
In a culmination of our efforts, our group presented each of our senior essays at the end of April with fellow students, scholars interested in eugenics and anti-eugenics, and friends and family members. At the end of our panel, we hosted a Q&A session where audience members asked us about our work and also about broader questions, like how to center the subjects of eugenics in our work, how we see the continuation of eugenics in modern-day and modern politics, and how to live anti-eugenically.
Mayah Monthrope, who graduated with a degree in the History of Science and Medicine, presented her work first. Her project was titled “A Contentious History of Eugenic Sterilization Laws in the United States, 1907 - 1937,” and aimed to complicate narratives about the dominance of eugenics in American legislatures. She spoke about how, generally, when describing the history of eugenic sterilization laws, historians and scholars tend to think of the laws as uniform across state lines. Instead, Mayah showed, by closely analyzing the history of sterilization legislation in Oregon and Connecticut, the disparities in the laws across state lines, as well as differences in how the laws came to be passed.
I presented next on my essay titled “Same Tools, Forgotten Past: How Eugenics Lives on in the Criminal Legal System.” My project is about three “sites” I’ve identified, where tools created by eugenicists continue to be used in the criminal legal system, often in direct alignment with eugenic logics. I traced the legal history of each of the three tools — intelligence testing, sterilization and castration, and habitual offender laws — intending to track how the theory behind and uses of the tools have changed throughout the past century. I hope that, by tracing the genealogy of these tools and their direct linkages to eugenics, I can demonstrate three places where legal practitioners can work to create change in the criminal legal system and move towards an anti-eugenic criminal legal system.
After me, Sarah Shapiro, who graduated with a Bachelor's and Master's degree in American Studies and an Intensive Certificate in Education Studies, presented on her work titled “From the Clinic to the Court to the Classroom: Tracing the Afterlives of Eugenics in Individualized Education Programs for Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.” Sarah’s project aims to investigate the true history of Individualized Education Programs, which she links back to the history of eugenics and eugenicists’ fixation on categorizing intelligence and marking disability. She questions how claims to education access were configured under the “regime of legibility and illegibility” by eugenicist psychologists, how parental advocacy groups, litigators, and legislators navigated the saturation of eugenic access-knowledge in the legal system, and how The Quiet Revolution posed an opportunity for parental advocates to reclaim expertise about suitable access to public school for children. Finally, she frames the use of Individualized Education Programs as an “anti-eugenic project in the lexicon of eugenics,” and asks the audience to consider, “who’s the expert now?”
Finally, Dominique Romain, who graduated with a degree in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health, presented on her essay, titled “Between Uplift and Oppression: The Legacy of the National Negro Health Movement and the Eugenic Shadows of Public Health.” Her essay was about the connections between Black public health and eugenics, and focused specifically on the National Negro Health Week and movement, an initiative which aimed to address health disparities among African Americans through community mobilization, education, and hygiene promotion. Dominique presented about how the rise of the eugenics movement coincided with, and heavily impacted, efforts towards public health in the Progressive Era. Ultimately, her thesis aimed to show that despite the improvements achieved by collective organizing, the troubling eugenic undertones manifested in ways that continue to negatively impact Black communities today.
Yakeleen Almazán, who was not able to join us for the symposium, wrote a senior capstone for the Education Studies Intensive Certificate titled “Teaching Anti-Eugenics Through the Archives: A Teaching Assistant Portfolio for the "Eugenics and Its Afterlives" Course at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, Spring 2025.” Yakeleen’s project investigates the pedagogical, historical, and ethical implications of teaching Eugenics and its afterlives within the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution during Spring 2025. She writes about her work as a Teaching Assistant for Professor Daniel Martinez HoSang for the course, and how she designed and facilitated eight archival source engagement modules for the students. Overall, her work “seeks to contribute to the work of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale by modeling educational practices that are grounded in the transformative potential of archival learning behind prison walls.”
You can read all of the student papers here.