Kylie Smith

Dr. Kylie Smith is Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associate Faculty in the Emory College Department of History. Professor Smith received her PhD from the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, Australia, and came to Emory in 2015 as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Nursing and Humanities. Her first book, Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing, 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.

In 2022, Dr. Smith became the Founding Director of the new Center for Healthcare History and Policy, which supports collaboration, knowledge-sharing and community-building across Emory University and Emory Healthcare. The goal of the Center is to build pathways and opportunities for students and faculty to incorporate historical insights into health care work that advances justice and equity. 

Her forthcoming book, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South will be published by the University of North Carolina Press this fall. 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 will be released in print, as a free downloadable E-book, and an Open Access Digitally enhanced monograph on the Manifold Scholar platform.