[SydPhil] HPS Research Seminar, Monday 9 March 2026 at 5.30pm

[HPS Admin]

School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
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Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South
Kylie Smith

Dates: Monday, 9/3/2026
Start Time: 5:30pm
Venue: Carslaw Building (F07), Level 4, Room 450
How to register: Free, no registration required
Website: https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/kA12C3QNPBi9nX3n0COHJSQ2t6_?domain=t.e2ma.net>

Abstract:  “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South” documents the impact of racial segregation and the fight for medical civil rights in the state psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi between 1948 and 1972. Drawing on extensive archival and legal records, as well as first-hand accounts, Kylie Smith explores the ways that local Black communities and families negotiated mental health care in the context of white supremacy and fought for their rights as citizens. By placing the history of these hospitals in the context of the Civil Rights movement, the book adds to both the history of psychiatry and the history of Civil Rights, demonstrating the multiple terrains on which activists fought to end segregation. In doing so, Smith argues that psychiatry itself was deeply entwined with the Southern racial project, and that Black patients were particularly vulnerable to populist politics. This combination of political expediency and scientific racism created hospitals which operated as little more than prisons in the wake of the plantation, and laid the foundation for racist approaches to mental health care today.


Bio: Dr. Kylie Smith was until recently Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associate Faculty in the Department of History at Emory University in Atlanta. While in the US, Kylie taught courses on race and health in US history and authored two monographs in the history of psychiatry.

Her first book, Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing, published by Rutgers University Press in 2020, won the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing and the American Journal of Nursing’s Book of the Year Award in the area of History and Public Policy.

Her new book, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South was published by the University of North Carolina Press in January 2026. Initial research for the book was supported by the National Library of Medicine (NIH) G13 Grant, and thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities program, the book has been released in print, as a free downloadable E-book, and an Open Access Digitally enhanced monograph on the Manifold Scholar platform.

In between monographs, Kylie co-edited, with Courtney Thompson, the collection “Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians”. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025, the book contains 28 essays on the challenges of developing an ethics of care for historical work at the intersection of health, medicine, and justice.

Kylie received her PhD (a study of history of juvenile delinquency in Australia) from the University of Wollongong and has returned to Australia to continue her work on a history of forensic psychiatry and juvenile detention in colonial regimes

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