September 20th at 12:20p: Hannah Waits Kicks Off the APHI 2023-2024 Seminar Series

The BU American Political history seminar series will resume on September 20th with our first presenter:

Hannah Waits (Harvard) will present an article in progress titled: “Missionary Positions: How American Evangelicals Learned to Love Global AIDS Work, 1985-2005.”

From the mid-1980s to mid-2000s, American missionaries conducted widespread information campaigns across the United States to change U.S. evangelicals’ emotions and perceptions of the AIDS epidemic and secure evangelicals’ support for global AIDS work. Drawing on longstanding colonial discourses about suffering foreign bodies, missionaries conditioned U.S. evangelicals to shift their feelings about AIDS from disgust to grief, which activated practices of compassion. With evocative stories about their work across the Global South, missionaries taught evangelicals to understand the AIDS epidemic as an opportunity to convert millions of souls, expand control over Black and brown foreign bodies, and strengthen heteropatriarchy around the world. Once U.S. evangelicals learned to love global AIDS work, they funded abstinence-only sex education courses packaged as AIDS prevention programs across the Global South. Missionaries’ information campaigns facilitated U.S. evangelicals’ dramatic transformation in these decades from the most implacable foes of people with HIV/AIDS domestically to some of the biggest supporters of AIDS work internationally. Assessing U.S. evangelicals’ changing attitudes about and involvement with the AIDS epidemic reveals how transnational religious networks linked U.S. conservative political priorities to global health humanitarianism and how religious actors expanded American global power in a postcolonial context.

The seminar will be held in Room 504, 226 Bay State Road, at 12:20p on September 20th. Please RSVP for lunch at aphi@bu.edu.