Ava Purkiss

Ava Purkiss’ research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of race, gender, health, and the body. Her book, Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), explores how African American women used physical exercise to express both literal and figurative fitness for citizenship. Her work places Black women squarely within the history of American fitness culture and challenges assumptions about Black women’s mobility, physicality, and corporality. Purkiss is at work on a second research project on race, gender, and gynecology in the twentieth century.

Purkiss earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin and has received fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, the American Association of University Women, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of the 2017 Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Prize for best dissertation in U.S. women’s history and the 2018 Letitia Woods Brown prize for best article in African American women’s history from the Association of Black Women Historians. 

Research Areas: race, gender, and health; Black women’s history; African American history; modern American history; fitness culture; history of medicine

Signature Courses: Black Feminist Approaches to Health; Skin Deep: Race and Beauty in American Culture; Race, Gender, Recreation, and Sport in Twentieth-Century America; Black Women's History: Classics and New Directions

Affiliations: Professor Purkiss holds a joint appointment in the LSA Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) and American Culture (AC), and by courtesy in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School.