Yale University (USA)
Angélica Clayton is a PhD candidate in the history of science and medicine at Yale University and joins SHaME as an Associate Fellow. Her dissertation looks at the history of psychological trauma in the United States from the 1970s through the early 2000s, tracing the formation of a new medical-scientific community around this novel and variable idea and examining how trauma from sexual violence morphed as it moved through clinics, laboratories, courtrooms, activist spaces and public media. Her work uses feminist STS, black studies and disability studies to consider how theories of trauma from sexual violence resisted models of the human coming out of the Cold War and to push for a reexamination of trauma that centers intergenerational temporalities, embodiment, the environment and the interpersonal. In addition to her dissertation, Clayton is interested in depictions of trauma in literature and film and is currently working on a project on Elena Ferrante and Octavia Butler’s novels.