Ijeoma Kola

Ijeoma Kola is a historian of medicine and science specializing in the intersection of race, health, and the environment. Her research and teaching focus on the social construction of disease in Black bodies, African American lay expertise, health social movements, and the intersections of medical and environmental racism.

 

Her first book, I Can’t Breathe: Racism and the History of Asthma in Black America (under contract with UNC Press), is an intellectual, cultural, and political history of race and asthma in the United States in the long twentieth century. The manuscript argues that scientific, medical, and environmental racism have historically shaped the disease's perception and experience, driving present-day racial disparities in asthma prevalence. She is currently developing a second book, Kitchen Chemists: Black Women, Medical Neglect, and the Science of the Natural Hair Movement, which traces how Black women transformed their homes and digital forums into laboratories to combat the toxicity of mainstream chemical hair formulations, mobilizing as “citizen scientists” to fight for environmental justice and medical autonomy.

 

Kola’s scholarship has appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Environmental History, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. A committed public intellectual, she frequently contributes to digital publications and podcasts. Before joining the faculty, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the John J. Reilly Center, where she received the inaugural Health, Humanities, and Society Teaching Award. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and her A.B. with honors in the History of Science from Harvard University.