Biography

Christopher D.E. Willoughby is a historian and assistant professor with UNLV's African American and African Diaspora Studies program. His work focuses on the role of Atlantic slavery and scientific racism in fostering dangerous work environments and racial health disparities in the past and present.

Willoughby has published several works in this space. He authored Masters of the Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and edited Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (Louisiana State University Press, 2021). He has also penned academic articles, including an American Journal of Public Health essay that examines the consequences of slavery and racial science on treatment practices surrounding Black patients within the U.S. psychiatric field.

His public-facing editorials, reviews, and blogs on the history of blackface, medical schools' trade in human remains, and COVID-19 have been published by outlets including The Washington Post, Black Perspectives, and AL.com. Journalists around the globe have also called upon his expertise for articles on racial health disparities, the repatriation of stolen human remains, and the history of racism in shaping medical education.