Karissa Patton

Previous work completed in Department of History, University of Saskatchewan: Con(tra)cepts of Care: Southern Alberta Birth Control Centres & Reproductive Healthcare, 1969-1979 (2021) *Won the University of Saskatchewan Fine Arts & Humanities Dissertation Award (2021)

Karissa Robyn Patton (she/her) is a historian of gender, sexuality, health, and activism. She works at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society at the University of Edinburgh as an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow. She earned her BA and MA at the University of Lethbridge and her PhD at the University of Saskatchewan, where she studied the history of feminist birth control centres in Southern Alberta, Canada. This work received the USask’s Doctoral Dissertation Award in Humanities and Fine Arts in 2021. She’s taught courses on the history of health and medicine, oral history, and women & gender studies. And, in 2021 she developed and taught the inaugural Oral History Summer Institute at the Centre for Oral History & Tradition at the University of Lethbridge. Her current research program includes her work as a Co-investigator in the CIHR-funded project, Pelvic Health & Public Health in 20th Century Canada, and her comparative historical study of reproductive healthcare and activism in the UK and Canada between 1967 and the 1980s. She co-edited and published in the edited collection Bucking Conservatism (open access). And you can find her other work in the Canadian Journal for Health History, the Canadian Historical Review, and the edited collection Compelled to Act.