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Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Cooper is the only Black woman in the country running a traditional medical humanities program and is working diligently to change this statistic. She is also an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, the Director of the Program in African American History at The Library Company of Philadelphia (the country’s oldest cultural institution) a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Research Fellow, and has won a number of prestigious honors for her scholarly and advocacy work in reproductive and birthing justice. An in-demand public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has spoken widely across the U.S. and Europe. She has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences and reproductive justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2017) won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history.