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Research
Paula Michaels joined the History Department in 1997, after receiving degrees from Northwestern University (BA) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD, 1997). Her research interests lie in the cultural and political history of twentieth century Russia and Central Asia. In 2003, Michaels published Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia ( University of Pittsburgh Press), which won the Association for Women in Slavic Studies’ Heldt Prize for best book by a women in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. It was also a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. Combining colonial and postcolonial theory with intensive archival and ethnographic research, Curative Powers explores Soviet medical initiatives and their underlying political and social implications for and impact on Kazakh society. Her articles have appeared, among other places, in Russian Review, Feminist Studies, and Nationalities Papers. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the National Council for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Research, and the International Research and Exchanges Board.
At present, Professor Michaels is at work on a book-length study, tentatively titled Good Girls and Their Helpful Husbands: A Transnational History of Childbirth Preparation, 1930-80. The work analyzes the story of modern efforts to prepare women for childbirth and alleviate pain during delivery through education, and both physical and psychological training. It centers on an approach popularized in the U.S. as the Lamaze Method, but known worldwide as psychoprophylaxis. This method has its roots in the USSR, where followers of Pavlov’s theory of conditioned response developed this approach in an effort to fulfill the Soviet government’s promise of painless childbirth to its women. In 1951, obstetrician Fernand Lamaze traveled to the USSR and, based on what he witnessed, popularized his version of the method in his native France. With the founding in 1960 of the American Society for Psychoprophylaxis in Obstetrics, now known as Lamaze International, the method put down roots in the US. The book traces the transmission of this technique across the Iron Curtain in the midst of the Cold War, and seeks to lay bare the ways in which broader domestic and international cultural and political considerations impinged the experience of childbirth prior to the rise of the epidural. |
