History Department Faculty
Martin Summers
Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Martin Summers
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall Room S343
Telephone: 617-552-3814
Email: martin.summers@bc.edu
Education
- Ph.D., Rutgers University
Research Interests
African-American intellectual and cultural history; gender and masculinity; race and sexuality; race and mental Illness; African diaspora
Department
Biography
Martin Summers is a cultural historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S., with particular research and teaching interests in race, gender, sexuality, and medicine. He regularly teaches courses on post-1865 U.S. and African American history, gender and sexuality in African-American history, and medicine and public health in the African diaspora.
Summers’ current book project, Inner City Blues: African American Mental Health and Social Policy in Twentieth Century Urban America, is an historical examination of how social scientists, psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers, government officials, and community organizers understood the relationship between urbanization and mental illness, and consequently sought to address the mental health care needs of African Americans in so-called ghettoes. Summers’ research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
- Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- “Diagnosing the Ailments of Black Citizenship: The African American Medical Profession and the Politics of Mental Illness, 1895-1940.” In Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America, edited by Laurie Green, John McKiernan-Gonzalez, and Martin Summers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
- “Arguing for Our Race”: The Politics of Non-recognition and the Public Nature of the Black Masonic Archive,” in Steven Kantrowitz and Peter Hinks, eds., “All Men Are Free and Are Brethren”: Prince Hall Fraternalism and the Rise of a People (Cornell University Press, 2013).
- "'Suitable Care for the African When Afflicted With Insanity': Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective," in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84 (Spring 2010): 58-91.
- Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (UNC Press, 2004) — Recipient of 2005 American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award.
- "Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle-Class Masculinity," Gender and History 15 (November 2003): 550-74.
- “’This Immoral Practice’: The Prehistory of Homophobia in Black Nationalist Thought,” in Toni Lester, ed., Gender Nonconformity, Race and Sexuality: Charting the Connections (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).