WGS Professor Sarah Richardson's book, The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects, will be released by the University of Chicago Press on November 5, 2021. In The Maternal Imprint, Richardson explores the idea that the behavior and health of a woman can have long term effects on her offspring's health and wellbeing and provides a critical analysis of related conceptual and ethical issues. 

Professor Richardson is the author of Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (2013)  and Director of the GenderSci Lab, an interdiciplinary research group that works "advance the intersectional study of gender in the biomedical and allied sciences, counter bias and hype in sex difference research, and enhance public discourse surrounding the sciences of sex and gender."

We congratulate Professor Richardson on this publication! Keep an eye on our website for information about a Spring 2022 event celebrating her new book. 

Reviews

"[A] rigorous academic study... Policymakers, health-care providers, and scientific researchers will want to take note." - Publishers Weekly

"A rich, elegantly argued analysis of the long history of scientific and popular thinking about the 'maternal effects' on the fetuses that women gestate, full of well-articulated plunges into the archives of scientific texts and journals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an important, beautifully researched, and well-witten book by an author whose prior works have literally changed their fields." - Rayna Rapp, New York University