Taylor  Desloge

Taylor Desloge is a social historian of 19th- and 20th-century African American and urban history. His research and teaching interests span the fields of African American history, environmental history and urban history, but at the core he is interested in how African Americans defined health and well-being in the context of the industrial city and how those ideas served as a basis for critique and political action. At Connecticut College, he offers courses ranging from the survey course in African American history to seminars on the Black Freedom Struggle, modern American segregation, race and medical history, and the Great Migration

His research has resulted in several publications on topics including the political economy of St. Louis, Missouri’s industrial-era slums; the public-health roots of New Deal slum clearance; and grassroots, women-led movements for Black health in the era of the Great Migration. His ongoing manuscript, “The Tortured Pre-History of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis and the Politics of Public Health, 1877–1940,” rethinks the conventional view of urban blight as simply a preoccupation of Post–World War II planners, relocating its roots in a politics of public health that emerged a hundred years earlier, in the Post-Reconstruction era, when Black migration to the city and the rise of industrial capitalism raised new questions about both the social needs of St. Louis’ working class and the place of Black migrants in the future of the city. His dissertation earned an honorable mention for the Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History from the Urban History Association.

Professor Desloge joined Connecticut College as a visiting assistant professor of African American history in 2020. He received his doctorate in American History from Washington University in St. Louis in 2019, his master’s degree in History in 2015 and his bachelor’s degree in History from Princeton University in 2011.

Publications:

“Who Owns the ‘Lunger’ Building?: Disease, Property and the Limits of Accountability in Tenement Reform in St. Louis, 1832-1917,” Journal of Urban History (February 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144220906394 

“Creating the Lung Block: Racial Transition and the Making of the ‘New Public Health’ in a St. Louis Neighborhood, 1907-1940,” Missouri Historical Review 111, no. 2 (Jan. 2017): 124-150. https://digital.shsmo.org/digital/collection/mhr/id/59119 

“‘The Separation Should Be Complete’: The Fight for Homer G. Phillips Hospital and the Making of a New Healthcare Politics in Interwar St. Louis,” in St. Louis Currents: Facing Regional Issues at 250. Andrew J. Thiesling & T. Terrence Jones, eds. St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2016: 26-45.