Charles Ambler: Charles Ambler is Professor of History and former Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at El Paso. He received his PhD from Yale University and is a specialist on modern African history. During 2010 he was President of the African Studies Association. He has been working on various aspects of the history of alcohol and drugs in Africa since the 1980s. His relevant publications include Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (Co-edited with Jonathan Crush); “Alcohol and the Slave Trade in West Africa, 15th – 19th Centuries;” “Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia; and “Drunks, Brewers and Chiefs: Alcohol Regulation in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1939,” in the early volume on alcohol history, Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History. He is working on a monograph on Alcohol and Empire that looks at alcohol use and control in Africa and he is co-editing a volume on Drugs in Africa.
Nancy Campbell: Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, Campbell’s most recent book is Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World (Palgrave, 2011; co-authored with Elizabeth Ettorre). With JP Olsen and Luke Walden, she co-authored a visual history of the federal drug treatment hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, titled The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2008). She is also the author of a history of the science conducted by the Addiction Research Center (now the intramural research program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse), Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (University of Michigan Press, 2007), and of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2000). With Joseph Spillane she created the Oral History of Substance Abuse Research Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and the University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center. In 2009 she received the Media Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.
Eoin Cannon: Lecturer and Assistant Director of Studies in the History & Literature program at Harvard University. His book in progress, The Politics of Redemption: Addiction and Conversion in Modern American Culture, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press, for publication in early 2013. A cultural history of addiction recovery, it examines sobriety movements between the Civil War and World War II, and the roles their narratives played in advancing various social and political ideas. A former newspaper reporter based in Dorchester, Mass., he also writes on cities, sports, religion, and literature.
Elaine Carey: An Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, Elaine Carey is presently the Lloyd Sealy Research Fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is the author of Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (U. New Mexico Press, 2005) and co-editor with Andrae Marak of Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine: Historical Perspectives on Contraband and Vice in North America’s Borderlands (U. Arizona Press, 2011). Currently, she is completing a book-length study on women and drug trafficking, “Selling is more of a Habit: Women and Drug Trafficking in North America, 1900 to 1970.”
Claire Clark: Claire Clark is a dual degree MPH/PhD student in Behavioral Sciences and Culture, Science & Historyat Emory University. Her research, which concentrates on cultures of addiction and recovery in the United States, brings historical methods to bear on contemporary public health issues. Her dissertation, “The Half-blind World: a History of Therapeutic Communities for Drug Addiction, 1958-1992,” explores the influence of the 1960s counterculture on the development of the addiction treatment industry. In addition to musing about addiction on Points, she edits video dialogues for Bio-politics.org.
Michael Durfee: A Ph.D. candidate in the history department at SUNY Buffalo, Michael Durfee works under the advisement of Points Contributor Dr. David Herzberg. His prior education includes an M.A. in history from SUNY Buffalo and an M.A. in education from Lewis and Clark College. He is currently at work researching his dissertation which analyzes the dynamics of Crack Era reform from 1986 to 1992, loosely constructed.
Alexine Fleck: Alexine Fleck teaches English and Women’s Studies at the Community College of Philadelphia. She completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she wrote about the ways drug users and addicts enter into and challenge “expert” discourse on addiction. While completing her degree, she worked as an ethnographer tasked with mapping HIV transmission through drug use and sex work for an HIV-prevention research division at the university. Her work attempts to use the tools of literary analysis to understand and legitimize the lived experiences of drug use and addiction. When she is not teaching or writing, she spends time with her newly adopted horse, Annie.
Joseph Gabriel: Joe Gabriel is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities at the College of Medicine, Florida State University. He received his PhD in history from Rutgers University in 2006, and in 2006-2007 held a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in the science studies program at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently working on two projects that relate to this blog: a cultural history of drug addiction and narcotic control in the nineteenth-century United States, and a history of intellectual property rights and the moral economy of pharmaceutical development before World War II. Other topics of interest include the history of fetal and embryonic tissue research, the history and theory of trauma, philosophical pragmatism and neo-pragmatism, and the convoluted relationship between aesthetics, experience, and instrumental rationality in the context of the American political tradition. He also likes to dabble in electronic music production and drink coffee.
Amy Long (Media Liaison): Currently the Communications Coordinator for Media Coalition and Program Assistant for the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression in New York City, Amy Long is also the Media Liaison for Points. She previously worked for the ACLU’s Drug Law Reform Project in Santa Cruz, CA, and Common Sense for Drug Policy in Washington, D.C. Amy holds a BA in English and Women’s Studies and an M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida; her research there focused on the relationships among drug dealing, gender, and capitalism in early modern to contemporary narrative fiction.
Michelle McClellan: Michelle McClellan is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Stanford University, and she is very interested in interdisciplinary approaches to studying and teaching about addiction. Her research has focused largely on alcoholism and women, and she is completing a book that uses the figure of the alcoholic woman as a way to explore the complex intersection of gender and medicalization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. McClellan is also fascinated by issues of secrecy, disclosure, and public memory in the history of addiction, and she is beginning a collective biography of women who revealed their alcoholism during the last third of the twentieth century.
James Nicholls: James Nicholls is Reader in Media and Social Policy at Bath Spa University, Bath, UK. He researches drinking cultures and alcohol policy in the UK and is currently undertaking a British Academy Research Fellowship on recent developments in public discourse around alcohol. His book The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England was published in 2009 (U. Manchester Press), and he is working on a new book about alcohol and the media. He is also the Reviews Editor for The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.
Ron Roizen: Ron Roizen is an independent scholar and author of some of the earliest interdisciplinary studies of the alcoholism industry. Among these are his essay on “The Great Controlled-Drinking Controversy” (1987), his dissertation, “The American Discovery of Alcoholism, 1933-1939” (1991), and his web-posted paper “Paradigm Sidetracked” (1994), a study of early resistance to the emergent alcoholism paradigm at the Yale alcohol research center in the early 1940s. Ron telecommutes to a post in Kaye Fillmore’s research group at the Scientific Analysis Corporation in San Francisco and Alameda, California. Ron, his artist spouse, Maggie Entrekin Roizen, and their dog, Meistie, have lived in Wallace, Idaho since 1997. For a sampling of Ron’s work in the sociology of alcohol, see his webpage.
Stephen Snelders: Trained as an economic and social historian, Stephen Snelders wrote his Ph.D. on the history of LSD in the Netherlands. Between 2004 and 2010 he worked as a medical historian at VU-University Medical Center in Amsterdam. In 2011 he relocated to Utrecht University. He has written articles on the history of drugs as well as on the uses of psychedelics in psychiatry, addiction, and alcoholism. Other (often overlapping) research interests: piracy, Caribbean history, tropical medicine. In press is now his book on Freebooters of Medicine: The Search for Medical Knowledge in the Tropics, 1600-1800 (in Dutch).
Alex Tepperman (Editorial Intern): Currently a Doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Florida, Alex Tepperman received a Bachelor’s degree in History at the University of Toronto, a Master’s degree in History at the University of Rochester, and a Master’s in Criminology at the University of Toronto. He is, broadly speaking, interested in legal punishment and imprisonment in American history, with a particular interest in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vigilantism, and the culture of sports and fitness in prisons. In 2013, Oxford University Press will publish the third edition of Deviance, Crime, and Control: Beyond The Straight and Narrow, a monograph he has co-authored with his father Lorne Tepperman.
Managing Editors
Joe Spillane: Joe Spillane is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida, where he is also an affiliate of the Department of Sociology, Criminology & Law. He has published Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States (Johns Hopkins Press, 2000) and co-edited Federal Drug Control: The Evolution of Policy and Practice (Haworth Press, 2004). His current drug-related research agenda includes: the history and development of drug abuse liability assessment; addiction, trauma, and Vietnam veterans; and reflections on the nature of drug epidemics.
Trysh Travis: A 20th-century literary and cultural historian, Trysh Travis teaches in the Center for Women’s Studies & Gender Research at the University of Florida. She has published on the gender and power of addiction and recovery, spirituality, and bibliotherapy in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. Her book The Language of the Heart: a Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey appeared in 2009. With Timothy Aubry, she is the co-editor of the anthology “Re-Thinking Therapeutic Culture” (U. Chicago Press, forthcoming).
