Biography

Susanne M. Klausen received her doctoral degree in history from Queen’s University, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include the politics of fertility in southern Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and transnational movements for women’s reproductive rights and justice.

Klausen is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) that won the Women’s History Prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (2016) and the Joel Gregory Prize awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies (2016). She has published articles in the Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of South African History, Medical History, New Zealand Journal of History, and the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine as well as various encyclopedias and edited book collections.

Klausen is currently working with Jacana Press to publish posthumously the memoir of the pathbreaking Black anti-apartheid journalist Juby Mayet, for which Klausen wrote an extended introduction. She is also writing a monograph on the South African Immorality (Amendment) Act (1950) that criminalized sexual contact between whites and people of color. The monograph examines the implementation and impact of the apartheid state’s policing of inter-racial sexual relationships in an attempt to maintain whites’ mythical racial purity.