Natalie Lira is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the politics of reproduction, histories of medicine, and the ways that struggles for racial and reproductive justice intersect. She is the author of Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s (University of California Press), which combines insights from Latinx Studies, Disability Studies, and feminist scholarship on reproduction to examine Mexican-origin people’s experiences of eugenic sterilization and institutionalization. Her current project, Collective Care: Latina Health Activism in the United States, 1960-1990s, situates Latina health politics and activism as a cornerstone of 20th-century health rights movements in the United States. Dr. Lira is also co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab (SSJL), a multi-institution interdisciplinary research team that studies the history of eugenic sterilization in the United States.
