Biography
Élodie Edwards-Grossi is Associate Professor in American Studies and Sociology at IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine. Her research focuses on the medicalization of blackness from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era, the contemporary legacies of racial science in medicine, and the social and political uses of science in society then and now.
She has recently published two books: Bad Brains: la psychiatrie et la lutte des Noirs américains pour la justice raciale, XXe-XXIe siècles with Presses Universitaires de Rennes and Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity and Civil Rights in the US South, 1840–1940 with LSU Press in November 2022, which won the 2023 Jules and Francis Landry Award. She has also published articles in The American Sociologist, Endeavour, Social Science Information, New Genetics and Society, and the American Journal of Public Health. Her third book, entitled Le racisme scientifique et médical was co-written with Delphine Peiretti-Courtis and published with Presses Universitaires de France in 2026.
She is currently working on a new book project which is tentatively titled Hidden in Plain Sight: Race, Oil Infrastructure, and Environmental Sacrifice in the Age of Petrocapitalism. The book examines the production of polluted spaces due to the presence of petrochemical and manufacturing industries in socially disadvantaged, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods in California. Drawing from extensive fieldwork, the project focuses on the residents' perceptions of social, racial and environmental inequalities and territorial stigma in their neighborhood.
In 2017-2018, she received the Fulbright and Georges Lurcy fellowships to complete her dissertation in the department of History at Tulane University as a Visiting Research Fellow. She was a 2025 short-term Fellow at the Huntington Library.
Publications
Une opération de maintenance technique est en cours sur nos installations.