The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives
- Submitting institution
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The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 1540
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- ISBN
- 9781137520791
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This interdisciplinary co-edited collection (210,000 words) brings together historians, classicists, literary scholars, sociologists, demographers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. It includes 25 research chapters by scholars from the UK, Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is the widest-ranging historical consideration of infertility to date, spanning the ancient world to as-yet undeveloped reproductive technologies. It incorporates chapters on the UK, Europe, Asia, and North America. Its major contributions are to: challenge dominant narratives conflating experiences of infertility with biomedical ‘treatments’; explore involuntary childlessness in an unparalleled chronological and geographical breadth; examine experiences of infertility outside medicalized contexts; demonstrate the value of cross-disciplinary discussions in reconceptualising infertility as an object of study; and propose new methods for studying infertility in historical perspective.
Loughran and Davis contributed equally to the book’s intellectual design, commissioning contributors, editing chapters, and co-writing introductory material (volume introduction, 11,6000 words; five section introductions, 2,500 words each). Loughran was lead author on the co-written volume introduction and three of the section introductions. The lead author produced first drafts, subject to comment, revision, and inclusion of additional material by the second author. In addition, Loughran contributed a sole-authored chapter on cultural representations of infertility in British feminist literature and mass-market women’s magazines, c.1960-1980 (13,000 words).
The volume demonstrates the editors’ achievement in reframing an area of historical enquiry through volume and section introductions, and design and execution of the volume. Co-written material shows how popular discussion of infertility is present-minded and dominated by new reproductive technologies; provides an overview of themes and blind spots in historiographical, sociological, and ethnographic scholarship; demonstrates how de facto medicalized definitions of infertility shape research processes and findings; and argues for definitional clarity and expansive approaches to evidence to de-centre western perspectives and fully historicise the topic.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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