Dr. Rachel Moran

UNT Faculty Profile

Department of History

Rachel Moran is a historian of US women's and gender and political history, with a focus on gender, women's mental and physical health, medicine, and U.S. politics. Her first book, Governing Bodies, was on federal interest in body weight and physique. It looked at body building in the Civilian Conservation Corps, weight-based military rejection in World War II, and the policing of women's weight in the WIC nutrition program. Her current work uses archival and oral history to study women's activism and disease formation around postpartum depression between the 1960s to today. Her earlier work focused on body weight and the federal government, with an emphasis on creating the masculine soldier body and imaginings of the poor maternal body via food stamps and WIC. She has also published on the idea of "post-abortion syndrome," the sexist origins of critiquing the "nanny state," and the history of food stamps. She teaches undergraduate courses on histories of health, including Sickness and Health in US History, History of the Body, Madness and Mental Health in Modern History, and US Fitness Cultures. She teaches graduate courses in US politics. Outside of work, she stays busy with her two and five year old kids, and enjoys cooking and working out.