Laura Stark

Associate Professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society
Associate Professor of History

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

She is author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, which was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press. She has published several other works on the history of medicine, morality, and the modern state, and pieces on social theory. Her second book, “The Normals: A People’s History” is under contract. This book explores the lives of “normal control” research subjects enrolled in the first clinical trials at the US National Institutes of Health after World War II. Laura received her PhD from Princeton University in 2006; was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture at Northwestern University from 2006 to 2008; and held a Stetten Fellowship at the Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health from 2008 to 2009. She was on faculty at Wesleyan University before joining Vanderbilt in 2012.