Nicole N. Ivy is a Visiting Scholar in the American Studies Department at the George Washington University. Her scholarship tracks the circulation of black women’s medicalized bodies in U.S. gynecological discourse during the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Her book manuscript, “Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors and Spectacular Gynecology in the Nineteenth Century,” interrogates the forces of (e)valuation that produced enslaved women as gynecological test subjects in the antebellum South.

Ivy has held professional appointments in both academe and the museum field. She recently completed her tenure as a Museum Futurist and Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Fellow with the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums (CFM). Prior to this work, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB) and an inaugural postdoctoral fellow of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at IUB.

Her professional and scholarly interests include Black Study, histories of the future, Afro-Diasporic visual cultures, and public history. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Florida and her joint Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University.