Department

Religious Studies

Research

Brittany Acors specializes in the intersection of medicine and religion in twentieth-century America, paying a particular interest in vaccination, genetics, and health care. Her dissertation aims to explore how religious communities reacted to the polio vaccine of the 1950s. Her project seeks to uncover through archival research the never-before-told history of how religious communities championed, questioned, or opposed this vaccine, and to analyze how they used their religious frameworks to make sense of vaccine science.