Felicity Turner

Felicity M. Turner is an Associate Professor of U.S. History in the Department of History at Georgia Southern University, and a Provost Faculty Fellow for Interdisciplinary Education with the Institute for Innovative and Integrated Studies (I3S). She joined Georgia Southern in 2013. Her primary interests are in legal history, the history of healthcare, gender history, and nineteenth-century U.S. history. After earning her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Australia, she earned her PhD in history from Duke University in North Carolina in 2010. Before coming to Georgia Southern, Dr. Turner was a Law and Society Fellow at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University in Bloomington; the Law and Society Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison; and a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Studies Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. She has published several articles and essays on the legal history of reproduction in the nineteenth-century U.S., one of which received the 2014 Nupur Chaudhuri Award from the Coordinating Council of Women in History. Her book, Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022), uses cases of infanticide and infant death from across the nation to explore how ideas about property became gendered and racialized in the nineteenth-century U.S. As she argues, these ideas had important contemporary ramifications for law, medicine, and women. Recent and forthcoming publicatiosn relate to her new project on women, gender, and crime in the nineteenth-century US south.