Beth Linker

Linker is Chair of the Department of the History and Sociology of Science and the Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor in the Social Sciences.

She is also a former physical therapist and holds an M.A. in bioethics. Her research focuses on how disability becomes defined, medicalized, and marginalized in modern U.S. history. She is the author or editor of three books. Her most recent book, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024), is a historical consideration of how failing posture became a scientific and cultural inflection point in the late nineteenth century. For the next century to come, slouching became a feared pathology driven by a society-wide intolerance of non-normative, disabled bodies. For this project, Linker received grants from The American Council of Learned Societies, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Institutes of Health, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Linker’s first book, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago, 2011), reveals how the U.S. veteran welfare system became medicalized during the Great War in the hopes of eradicating war disabilities, a move that appealed to both fiscal conservatives who wished to scale back on veteran pension pay outs and to imperialists who wanted the U.S. to become a global military power. The book went on to be featured in a Ric Burns documentary titled A Debt of Honor in 2015. Linker is also the co-editor of Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Penn Press, 2014), a volume that includes the work of scholars from an array of disciplines who address multiple forms of disability discrimination and resistance efforts, then and now. Her award-winning articles on the history of the body, scientific ableism, health professionals, and the role that disability plays in defining modern-day epidemics and the history profession itself have appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and The American Journal of Public Health. She also has essays in Time, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, and Psyche (forthcoming).

In addition to her position in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, Linker is Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy (secondary appointment) in the Perelman School of Medicine and a core faculty member in Penn’s Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Barbara Bates Center for the History of Nursing, and the Wolf Humanities Forum.

In the spring of 2017, she was awarded the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the university’s highest teaching honor. She teaches classes on the history of disability, surgery, health care policy, gender, and the body.

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