marissac@buffalo.edu | CV

Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow 2017
Producer, DIG: A History Podcast

Co-Advisors: Claire Schen and Erik Seeman
Concentration: Early Modern Europe | England | Atlantic

MLS Library Science, University at Buffalo
BA History, Niagara University

Dissertation Title: “Body Work: Wet-Nurses and Politics of the Breast in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia and London”

My dissertation compares the lived experiences of wet-nurses in London and Philadelphia in the 18th century. I consider the surveillance of wet-nurses bodies by their employers and by poor relief authorities, Enlightenment ideals of motherhood, breastfeeding lore, and the intersectionality of race and class concerns in wet-nursing relationships, etc.

Publications: 

Poking Holes in Political Memes: History, the Welfare State, and the Trope of the Founding Fathers, Nursing Clio (blog), June 2016.

“Domestic Vulnerabilities: Reading Families and Bodies into Eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic Wet Nurse Advertisements”. Journal of Family History. 40 (1): 39-63.

“Milk Sharing: What History can Teach Us,” Nursing Clio (blog), Oct 2015

“Mommy Wars of Yore: Classism and its Casualties,” Nursing Clio (blog), Feb 2016