About

Jonathan Sadowsky holds degrees in History from Wesleyan, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, and studied psychiatric epidemiology at Columbia. He is the author of Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness and Colonialism in Southwest Nigeria (University of California, 1999); Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy (Routledge, 2016) and The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity Books, 2020). He is co-editor of the six-volume Cultural History of Madness, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. The recipient of several teaching awards, Sadowsky offers courses in the history of medicine, history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and madness; modern African history; the comparative history of race, slavery, and colonialism; and world history.

 

 

Publications

Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria

 

Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: The Anatomy of a Medical Controversy

The Empire of Depression: A New History

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