Sasha Turner of North Haven, associate professor of history at Quinnipiac University. Photo by Quinnipiac University.
Sasha Turner of North Haven, associate professor of history, was recently recognized as the 2018 faculty scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences at Quinnipiac University during a university reception at the Rocky Top Student Center.
“Sasha Turner’s scholarship is timely, urgent and exemplary,” said Robert Smart, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “We rely on scholars like Sasha to raise our horizon of understanding and thereby help change humanity for the better. She does that with regularity.”
Turner, who joined the faculty in 2010, is the author of “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica,” an illuminating study about how for almost 30 years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women’s labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Turner contends that such adjustments further exploited enslaved people and disrupted the social bonds and cultural practices enslaved people created around reproductive health care and childbirth.
“I am encouraged to have my work so honored by my university community, whose support for my research has been invaluable,” Turner said.
Turner has a doctorate in history and a master of philosophy degree in historical studies from the University of Cambridge. She also has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of West Indies at Mona, Jamaica.