Alum Natalie Shibley CC’12 has won a pair of awards for her research article “Policing Venereal Disease at Fort Huachuca, 1941-1945,” which appeared in the Journal of Military History. The article won the 2025 Prize for an Article or Essay from the Society for History in the Federal Government and the 2025 Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize from the Coordinating Council for Women in History.
Although the journal is a private members-only publication, it did publish a summary of Shibley’s article:
“This article discusses the racialization of venereal disease during World War II at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the installation with the largest number of African American troops, arguing that medical and law enforcement surveillance overlapped in venereal disease prevention efforts in ways unique to the post’s location and racial demographics. It analyzes how military and civilian agencies attempted to limit venereal disease and how Black officers and enlisted men and women responded to and influenced these policies. The U.S. Army used statistics to construct venereal disease as a racially specific problem and developed venereal disease education efforts at the post. Gendered effects of venereal disease control policy included a proposal to quarantine civilian women within the post hospital. As the army tried to maintain racial, gender, and geographic boundaries, the biomedical and carceral technologies used to police venereal disease grew more similar.”
Shibley is a historian and a Henry A. Kissinger Visiting Scholars Associate Research Scholar in the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy in the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University.
She is writing a manuscript about race, homosexuality investigations, and notions of disease in the U.S. military from the 1940s to 1990s. Currently titled “Before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Homosexuality, Race, and Contagion in the U.S. Military, 1941-1993,” the manuscript is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
Shibley is also co-editor, with Dorothy Roberts and Eram Alam, of “Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science” (Columbia University Press, 2024).
