Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies; Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology (by courtesy)
she/her
About
Ava Purkiss’ research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, health, and the body. 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 explores both anti-Black and Black feminist practices of gynecology in the twentieth century. In addition to these individual projects, she has also worked on multidisciplinary research teams to examine the effects of chemotherapy-induced alopecia on Black breast cancer patients (Cancer, 2023) and propose ambivalence as a feminist analytic, affect, and project (Signs, 2024).
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 monograph in the field of history (for Fit Citizens). The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan awarded her the 2024 Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award for outstanding teaching.
From 2024 to 2027, she will undertake training in reproductive health sciences and gynecological medicine as a Mellon New Directions Fellow.
Research Areas: race, gender, and health; Black women’s history; African American history; modern American history; fitness culture; history of medicine; reproductive health histories
Signature Courses: Black Feminist Approaches to Health; Skin Deep: Race and Beauty in American Culture; Race, Gender, Recreation, and Sport in Twentieth-Century America; Black Women's History: Classics and New Directions
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.
