Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies; Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology (by courtesy)
she/her
About
Ava Purkiss’ research interests are united by a commitment to the study of the material body—how it moves, the ways it feels, the structures that impair it, and the forces that enable its flourishing. Much of her scholarship lies at the intersection of race, gender, and health. Her first book, Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), explores how African American women used physical exercise to express both literal and figurative “fitness” for citizenship. Her work places Black women squarely within the history of American fitness culture and challenges assumptions about Black women’s mobility, physicality, and corporality. Inspired by the close-knit histories of women’s exercise, health, and medicine, Purkiss’ current research project surveys both anti-Black and Black feminist gynecology in the twentieth century. Collaborating with colleagues in obstetrics and gynecology and cancer genetics, she has examined the effects of chemotherapy-induced alopecia on Black breast cancer patients (Cancer, 2023).
Extending her scholarly inquiries to the realm of affect, Purkiss has co-researched “ambivalence” as a feminist emotion (Signs, 2024) and explored Black joy during the “nadir” of race relations (JGAPE, 2025).
Purkiss earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin and has received fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of the 2017 Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Prize for best dissertation in U.S. women’s history, the 2018 Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Prize for best article in African American women’s history, and the 2024 Western Association of Women Historians Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for best historical monograph (for Fit Citizens). In 2024, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan awarded her the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award for outstanding teaching.
From 2024 to 2027, she will undertake training in reproductive health sciences and medicine as a Mellon New Directions Fellow.
Additional Works
“The Intimacy of Exercise” (2024)
“Historicizing Black Women’s Anti-Fatness” (2023)
“Beauty Secrets: Fight Fat” (2017)
Research Areas: race, gender, health, and the body; affect; Black women’s history; African American history; modern American history; history of medicine; reproductive health histories
Affiliations: Professor Purkiss holds an appointment in the LSA Department of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) and by courtesy in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
