Contact Information
lfreiden@wellesley.edu
Telephone: 781-283-2614
Office Hours:

Current Courses:

221 Women's Reproduction in Historical Perspective
323 Sexuality and Childbirth

Biography

Lara Freidenfelds received her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University in 2003. She is currently completing a book manuscript, The Modern Period: A History of Menstruation in Twentieth Century America, based on research conducted for her dissertation. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities and the Women’s Studies Department, Freidenfelds will be conducting research for her next book, about the history of miscarriage and cultural constructions of early pregnancy. Examining factors ranging from demography to new obstetric and contraceptive technology to political movements concerning abortion, Freidenfelds will ask how first-trimester miscarriage, a statistically very common event, has come to be experienced and understood as a shocking, tragic loss of an almost-child by so many women by the early twenty-first century.
Dr. Freidenfelds is interested more broadly in the history of the body, medicine, and women’s health, and American women’s social and cultural history. At Harvard, she taught a History of Science undergraduate seminar, "Private Stories in Public Places: Documents for Telling the History of Experiences of Sexuality and Childbirth," and assistant taught an interdisciplinary Women’s Studies course, “Bodies and Boundaries,” with Prof. Charis Thompson. As a visitor in Women’s Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, she gave a lecture course, “Comparative Structures of Gender: The United States and China in the Twentieth Century.” Freidenfelds holds an A.B. in anthropology from Harvard University, and often incorporates anthropological methods and insights into both her research and her teaching.
In addition to her work as a historian, Lara Freidenfelds is a professional modern dancer, and has performed with a number of San Francisco Bay Area choreographers including Nina Haft, Carol Kueffer and Sima Belmar. Her own choreography has both drawn on and contributed to her research in the history of the body, and she hopes one day to create a multidisciplinary, performance and text-based analysis of bodily “discipline,” creativity and freedom, bringing the bodily insights of modern dance training and performance to bear on academic theories of Foucauldian disciplining of the body.

PUBLICATIONS

Book manuscript, The Modern Period: A History of Menstruation in Twentieth Century America, in progress.

Lara Freidenfelds, Entries on "Artificial Insemination," "Egg Donation," "Sonography" and "Surrogacy" for Paula Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Childhood (New York: Macmillan, 2004).

Lara Freidenfelds, review of Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58 (Oct 2003): 490-492.

Lara Freidenfelds, "A History of Obstetric Anesthesiology: Numb to Predecessors' Arguments?" MSJAMA, January 5, 2000 (review of Donald Caton, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform: The Medical and Social Response to the Pain of Childbirth From 1800 to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.)).

Allan Brandt and Lara Freidenfelds, "Context and Community: Assessing the Ethics of Industry-Funded Research," in Nancy M. P. King et. al., eds., Beyond Regulations: Ethics in Human Subjects Research (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 128-134.

Allan Brandt and Lara Freidenfelds, "Research Ethics after World War II: The Insular Culture of Biomedicine," Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 6.3 (1996): 239-243.

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Lara Freidenfelds, “Chinese Immigrants, Their Daughters and the American “Modern” Body in the Twentieth Century,” presented at the Organization of American Historians annual conference, April 19-22, 2006.

Lara Freidenfelds, “Menstruation in the Twentieth Century United States: Envisioning the "Modern" Middle Class Body,” presented at the Berkshires Conference on the History of Women, June, 2005.

Lara Freidenfelds, “Purchasing ‘Unmentionables’: Menstrual Products in the Consumer Age,” presented at the American Historical Association annual conference, January 6-9, 2005.

Lara Freidenfelds, "Talking about PMS: Crossing Boundaries of Gender, Medicine and Mentionablity," presented at the History of Science Society annual conference, November 7-10, 2002.

Lara Freidenfelds, "Constructing and Deconstructing the Medical Narrative of Menstruation in the Twentieth Century United States," presented at the American Association of the History of Medicine annual conference, April 25-28, 2002.

SELECTED HONORS

Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History research grant, 2002-2003

Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, 2001-2002.

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 1996 -1999.

2001 Recipient of Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine, for "Recruiting Allies for Reform: Henry Knowles Beecher’s 'Ethics and Clinical Research.'"

2001 Recipient of Robinson Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, for "Technology and the Production of Gendered and Classed Subjects: Tampons in the Twentieth Century United States."