Digital Alchemy - Ep4 - Final Version

SONIC Northwestern17min

Moya Bailey

00:02

ICA presents

Moya Bailey

00:17

Hello, and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I've invited Dr. Cooper Owens to join me to discuss her journey as a historian, speaker, and her commitment to teaching community based history.

Moya Bailey

00:53

I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I want to read your bio, and just give people a little bit of an introduction into all of the awesomeness that you are bringing to the podcast today. Dierdre Cooper Owens, an award winning historian and popular public speaker is the trials and Linda Wilson professor in the history of medicine, and director of the humanities and medicine program at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. In this position, Dr. Cooper Owens is one of two black women in the US running a medical humanities program. Dr. Cooper Owens is also the director of the program in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the country's oldest cultural institution, as a teacher and a public speaker. Cooper Owens is a proud graduate of two historically black colleges and universities, the all women's Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned her PhD in history at UCLA, and has had a number of prestigious fellowships at the University of Virginia, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and as a big 10 Academic Leadership Fellow, as one of the country's most acclaimed experts in US history. According to Time Magazine, Cooper Owens is steadily working towards making history more accessible and inspiring for all. So one, what an incredible bio. What an incredible person who's doing the work that is actually helping our communities to grow and learn, and so I wanted to start a little bit with the history that you provide, in your own story. What got you interested at this intersection of blackness, and medicine? And how do you feel like that interest has carried you forward in your academic career?

Dr. Cooper Owens

02:58

Yeah, what a great question. Thank you to so much for having me, and for indulging me prior to the recording of this podcast. That shows your generosity and your collegiality. What got me interested is really an all honesty. When I think about it, it's my family. My mother has a degree in biology and as a retired teacher, but also our family historian. She's a genealogist who traced our family's history back to the colonial period in South Carolina. And then my father worked at the National Archives for 30 something years before he retired. And so when I think about it, I've always been kind of immersed in those worlds without really appreciating it until I became a historian. But outside of my parents, I would say my grandfather, he has the blackest name ever. He was born in 1911 in South Carolina, but his name was King Solomon Cooper.

Moya Bailey

04:00

Okay, King Solomon.

Dr. Cooper Owens

04:02

King Solomon is my favorite human being, even though he's passed on some while ago. His telling of stories and his patience with me in asking a ton of questions about the past. I was always interested in history, and here was this man who lived through so much. He really was the person who sparked my interest with being attracted to the stories of history.

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