Hilde Bras
University of Groningen Aletta Jacobs Professor of Economic and Social History
Hilde Bras is Aletta Jacobs Professor of Economic and Social History, with special attention to Global Demography and Health at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Bras is an elected member of the Social Sciences Council and an alumna of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Senior Research Associate of the Global Data Lab (Radboud University), chair of the Nominating Committee of the Social Science History Association (2020-2021), board member of the Groningen Centre for Health and Humanities and the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, and editorial board member of The History of the Family. She has published widely on marriage and fertility, nutrition and health, gender and social inequalities, and long-term shifts in family and kinship relations. Bras has been awarded two large personal grants for her research on fertility and life courses via the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme of the Dutch Research Council. Since 2016, her research has mostly focused on reproductive and child health in the Global South, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). She has studied gender relations and unintended birth in SSA, exclusive breastfeeding in Tanzania, child malnutrition in Ethiopia, and women’s childbearing trajectories in Senegal. Currently, she is starting a new research project on White Sisters, nursing practices, and reproductive health in East Africa, 1890-present. Together with a PhD student from Nigeria, she will investigate the changing discourses and practices of missionary nursing from a critical intersectional perspective, disentangling underlying gender, racial, and cultural tensions between nurses and doctors, nurses and patients, and colonial and indigenous nurses. The project also examines the relationship between changing nursing practices and reproductive health using archival sources, oral history, and (historical) maternity registers from four hospitals in Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi.