Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses on reproduction, family, maternity, and health from a transnational historical perspective. Bourbonnais is the author of two books, Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her current research project explores the history and politics of maternity at the World Health Organization from the 1940s to early 2000s. She is also a podcast host at the New Books Network, publishing interviews with scholars working on reproduction and sexuality across disciplines.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

One of the things I find most exciting about studying reproduction is the truly interdisciplinary nature of the field. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, demographers, geographers, and public health researchers come at the same basic questions – why people do or do not have children, why this becomes a site of public debate or policy – through very different methodologies and theories. Most recently, I’ve been branching out into feminist science and technology studies, feminist political economy, social reproduction theory, and maternal theory, all of which have added new layers to the way I think about global reproductive politics and practice. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Probably the biggest shift has been in my understanding of who and what counts as “history” and “politics.” The classic “Great Man,” timeline version of history I encountered when I was young – those long lists of leaders and dates of battles – never really resonated with me. Only in my undergrad degree (at UBC in Vancouver) did I see that everything can be historicized and everyone is a historical actor. Every cultural norm, every social practice, every material object has a longer story behind it that helps explain who we are and why we do the things we do. Every person contributes to historical continuity or change, through both their action and inaction in the smallest of spaces. Likewise, “politics” – in the broad sense of struggle over power and resources – happens in all spheres of life, not just the public arena.

This orientation was further nurtured by my wonderful PhD supervisor Lara Putnam and the graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh, which also exposed me to the connections between social and global history. Rather than seeing “the global” as a sphere confined to high-level geopolitics and “the social” as a local category of analysis, we explored the way these were fundamentally linked. This is still the kind of history and political analysis that most interests me.

Your book, The Gospel of Family Planning, highlights how the everyday work of local nurses and community workers shaped family planning in ways that were often overlooked. What lessons can we learn from this for contemporary international reproductive health campaigns?

First, I think it challenges the still prevalent assumption that family........

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