Kathleen M. Joyce, PhD

Assistant Professor, Religion
Duke University
kmjoyce@duke.edu

Professor Joyce's main research focus is on the history of American medicine and religion. She has written on the intersection of American medical history, Catholicism, and gender studies. She is also concerned with the variety of perspectives on suffering and redemption, and has presented papers on these and other subjects at (for example) the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the Duke-UNC Colloquium on Science, Medicine and Technology. She has taught in Duke's undergraduate Health Care and Society FOCUS program, exploring the interaction between religious beliefs and developments in science and medicine in the past two centuries.

In progress is Vowed Labor: Catholic Nuns and the Birth of the American Hospital System, a book providing a social history of Catholic hospitals. In it, Joyce examines the activities of Catholic women religious in the nineteenth century and their impact on social welfare and the medical infrastructure of the United States. A second current project is on the history of therapeutic abortion in the US, 1870-1973, a widely discussed issue in both medical and public circles.

While working as both a hospital chaplain and later a hospice chaplain in the years before she entered graduate school, Professor Joyce was immersed in questions of how our culture handles death and illness, often placing the blame for disease and illness on the sick person him-or herself. Her pastoral work in this area has profoundly shaped her scholarly interests.