Deborah Rudacille | |
---|---|
Born | July 1958 |
Nationality | American |
Education | BA (1980) Loyola College MA (1998) Johns Hopkins University |
Occupation(s) | Journalist and author |
Website | deborahrudacille.com |
Deborah Rudacille (born July 1958) is an American journalist and science writer. [1] She has worked as a news editor for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative in New York, and in May 2012 became Professor of the Practice in journalism at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. [2] In April 2017, Rudacille was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Science Writing for a project titled "The Family Disease: Alcoholism, Addiction and Inheritance."
Rudacille is the author of The Scalpel and the Butterfly (2000), a history of the practice and politics of animal testing, The Riddle of Gender (2004), which examines scientists' attempts to define gender and the effect that had on transgender people, and Roots of Steel (2010), about the history of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation steelworks in Sparrows Point, Maryland. [3]
The Scalpel and the Butterfly was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the year's best non-fiction books, and The Riddle of Gender was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. [4]
Rudacille was born in Dundalk, Maryland into a working-class family with a long history of working for the local steelmill, including her father and his brothers, her grandfather and her great-grandfather. Her mother worked for the United Steel Workers labor union. [5] Her maternal grandparents were first generation Italian-American immigrants who arrived during World War II, while her paternal grandparents had arrived in the 1920s. [6]
She attended Our Lady of Hope elementary school and The Catholic High School of Baltimore. [7] She obtained her BA in 1980 from Loyola College and her MA in 1998 from the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University, where she specialized in science writing. In May 2012, she joined the English department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, as Professor of the Practice. She teaches courses on science and medical writing, community journalism in the digital age, and the history of medical attempts to define gender and alcoholism. [2]
Dundalk is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States. The population was 67,796 at the 2020 census. In 1960 and 1970, Dundalk was the largest unincorporated community in Maryland. It was named after the town of Dundalk in County Louth, Ireland. Dundalk is considered one of the first inner-ring suburbs of Baltimore.
Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.
Anna Kingsford was an English anti-vivisectionist, vegetarianism and women's rights campaigner.
Deborah Holland is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. She rose to national prominence in 1987 as the lead singer and songwriter of Animal Logic featuring Stanley Clarke and Stewart Copeland.
Rebecca L. Skloot is an American science writer who specializes in science and medicine. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), was one of the best-selling new books of 2010, staying on The New York Times Bestseller list for over 6 years and eventually reaching #1. It was adapted into a movie by George C. Wolfe, which premiered on HBO on April 22, 2017, and starred Rose Byrne as Skloot, and Oprah Winfrey as Lacks's daughter Deborah.
Sparrows Point is an industrial area in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, United States, adjacent to Edgemere. Named after Thomas Sparrow, landowner, it was the site of a very large industrial complex owned by Bethlehem Steel, known for steelmaking and shipbuilding. In its heyday in the mid-20th century, it was the largest steel mill in the world. The site of the former Bethlehem Sparrows Point Shipyard and steel mill is now renamed Tradepoint Atlantic in a revitalization program to clean up the environment and make it one of the largest ports on the East Coast of the United States. Today Sparrows Point is home to many distribution centers, fulfillment centers, training lots, storage lots, and the like, including those operated by Under Armour, Amazon, Home Depot, Volkswagen, and McCormick & Company.
Alexander John Goodrum (1960–2002) was an African-American transgender civil rights activist, writer, and educator. He was the founder and director of TGNet Arizona. He was a board member of the Tucson GLBT Commission, and the Funding Exchange's OUT Fund, which allocates an annual grant named after Goodrum to LGBT community organizing projects such as the Latina lesbian magazine, Esto no tiene nombre, edited in part by Tatiana de la tierra.
Dundalk High School (DHS) is a four-year public high school in the United States, located in Baltimore County, Maryland. The school opened in 1959. Starting in 2010, DHS was rebuilt and combined with Sollers Point Technical High School. The new building opened in 2013.
The University of Minnesota runs a number of studies involving non-human primates, most notably research into drug addiction. The studies have attracted the attention of local and national animal rights groups, most especially the drug addiction studies of Marilyn Carroll, which she performs on primates, rats, and mice.
Paul Rodney McHugh is an American psychiatrist, researcher, and educator. He is currently the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author, co-author, or editor of seven books in his field.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the U.S. state of Maryland enjoy the same rights as non-LGBT people. The state's anti-sodomy provisions were ruled unconstitutional in 1999 and repealed by the state's legislature in 2023. Maryland has had statewide protections against discrimination based on an individual's sexual orientation since 2001 and gender identity since 2014. Legislation to legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland was approved by voters on November 6, 2012 and went into effect on January 1, 2013. Today, the state of Maryland is regarded as one of the most LGBT-friendly states in the country, with a 2022 Public Religion Research Institute showing that 87% of Marylanders support LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws. Additionally, a ban on conversion therapy on minors became effective on October 1, 2018. In October 2020, Montgomery County passed unanimously an ordinance that implemented an LGBTIQ+ bill of rights.
Marie Françoise "Fanny" Bernard was a French anti-vivisection campaigner and creator of an anti-vivisection society. She was the wife of the pioneer in experimental research in physiology, Claude Bernard.
Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College. Stryker serves on the Advisory Council of METI and the Advisory Board of the Digital Transgender Archive. Stryker, who is a transgender woman, is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture. She is a leading scholar of transgender history.
Chrissy Lee Polis is a transgender woman who was beaten in an anti-transgender motivated hate crime on April 18, 2011, at a McDonald's in Rosedale, Maryland, just northeast of the city limits of Baltimore. A video of the beating was posted online and went viral. The attack had been conducted by teenage girls, aged 14 and 19. They were both prosecuted. The case heightened awareness of violence against transgender people in Maryland and protests were conducted.
Arlene Istar Lev is a North American clinical social worker, family therapist, and educator. She is an independent scholar, who has lectured internationally on topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity, sexuality, and LGBTQ families.
The city of Baltimore, Maryland includes a significant Appalachian population. The Appalachian community has historically been centered in the neighborhoods of Hampden, Pigtown, Remington, Woodberry, Lower Charles Village, Highlandtown, and Druid Hill Park, as well as the Baltimore inner suburbs of Dundalk, Essex, and Middle River. The culture of Baltimore has been profoundly influenced by Appalachian culture, dialect, folk traditions, and music. People of Appalachian heritage may be of any race or religion. Most Appalachian people in Baltimore are white or African-American, though some are Native American or from other ethnic backgrounds. White Appalachian people in Baltimore are typically descendants of early English, Irish, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh settlers. A migration of White Southerners from Appalachia occurred from the 1920s to the 1960s, alongside a large-scale migration of African-Americans from the Deep South and migration of Native Americans from the Southeast such as the Lumbee and the Cherokee. These out-migrations caused the heritage of Baltimore to be deeply influenced by Appalachian and Southern cultures.
Sofía Alvarez is an American playwright and screenwriter.
Amanda E. Taylor Norris was an American physician, the first woman physician in the state of Maryland. After graduating from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1880, she worked in private practice in the Baltimore area, spending nearly two decades teaching at coeducational and women's medical schools there.
Steelworkers and Shipyard Workers for Equality was a labor organization of Black workers at the Bethlehem Sparrows Point Shipyard in Sparrows Point, Maryland. Founded in the early 1960s, the organization fought for racial equality within the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The formation of the organization was encouraged by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the CORE-affiliated Maryland Freedom Union (MFU).