Research Bio

Sandra Eder is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. She specializes in the modern history of medicine, gender, and sexuality. Her work examines how medical and scientific ideas about the body, identity, and normalcy emerge and circulate, with particular attention to the development of knowledge surrounding sex and gender diversity. 

Her research explores how medical practices and classifications are shaped through social, cultural, and political processes, and how patients—including children—have actively contributed to these histories. Her scholarship bridges the fields of gender history, science and technology studies, and medical history, offering insights into how categories of difference are produced and negotiated in clinical and scientific settings.

Eder’s groundbreaking book How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2022) explores how clinical practices and medical classifications in the 20th century shaped modern understandings of gender, particularly through the treatment of intersex children. Her work reveals the deep entanglement of medical expertise, institutional authority, and social norms. Her current research project, The Science of Happiness, examines how scientists and clinicians have defined, localized, and measured happiness over the course of the twentieth century.

Research Expertise and Interest

gender, sexuality, medicine, science, US History 20th century, popular culture, history of childhood, happiness