Semaj Campbell-Blakes

Biography

Semaj Campbell-Blakes, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame. She is a historian of race, medicine, and public health whose research centers Black women’s and girls’ reproductive health in the twentieth-century United States.

Her dissertation, A City’s Neglectful Past: Young Black Mothers and the Creation of a Reproductive Health Crisis, 1900–2005, examines how schools, healthcare systems, public health agencies, and policymakers shaped the reproductive experiences of young Black mothers in Syracuse, New York. Her research draws on archival and oral history methods to document lived experiences often absent from institutional records. Her broader interests include Black women’s history, Black girlhood studies, reproductive justice, and the history of medicine and public health.

Campbell-Blakes earned her Ph.D. in History from Syracuse University, an M.A. in Africana Studies from the University at Albany, SUNY, and a B.A. in Sociology from SUNY Buffalo State University.