Edna Bonhomme will write a series of essays animating the reproductive lives of people of African descent as portrayed by contemporary Black feminist artists, filmmakers, and sages. Her writing will generate connections between the history of science and the aesthetics of the Black womb, narrating how the African diaspora has exercised agency through pregnancy termination. It will also conjure the rapturous texture of childlessness and infertility among those who develop alternative models to kin, including queer communities.
Edna Bonhomme is a writer, artist, and historian of science committed to critical storytelling. She is co-editor of After Sex (Silver Press, 2023) and the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues (Simon & Schuster, forthcoming). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, frieze, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and the Washington Post. In recent years, she has taught courses on cinema, global medicine, and pandemics at Bard College Berlin, Drexel University, Free University Berlin, and Humboldt University. She holds a PhD in History of Science from Princeton University.