Vincenza Mazzeo
PHD in History
PhD in History
Dr. Vincenza Mazzeo is a 2026-2028 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in Historical Studies and History at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, a double MA from McGill University and Carleton University, and an HBA/HBSc from the University of Toronto.
Vincenza is a feminist historian of Africa, medicine and global health, and women, gender, and sexuality. Her research examines state power and community-driven responses to state-sanctioned violence in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Her work is driven by the broad question: what happens when the state fails to provide, or begins to retract, healthcare for ordinary people?
Vincenza’s research uses oral history and women’s alternative media to examine how ideas of gender, race, health, and freedom were configured in liberationists' struggles across Southern Africa during the late 20th century.
Her recently completed dissertation, “Health and Liberation: Cervical Cancer, Women’s Health Activism, and the Politics of Resistance in Apartheid South Africa, 1982-1994” (2026), examines how women’s health activists organized across unionized factories, the medical profession, political networks, and grassroots organizations to challenge medical apartheid and the apartheid state. Breaking with historiographical norms, her research shows how tightly gender, health, and liberation were interwoven in South Africa’s liberationist and anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s.
Currently, Dr. Mazzeo is working on a book manuscript that centers on reproduction, race, and racism in medicine. It examines the role and work of revolutionary nurses and doctors, often women, in shaping state policies, Pan-African politics, and people’s health in Southern Africa.
Research Interests
Publications & Awards
Awards:
Vincenza is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) Linda Souter Humanities Award, National Science Foundation Award, Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI) Fellowship, and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine’s Doctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.
She is also the recipient of the Arts Undergraduate Society Teaching Award at McGill University and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins University. Recently, the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association and the African Feminist Initiative have sponsored her work.
Publications:
2026 - Mazzeo, Vincenza. “Re-writing Women in the Struggle Against Apartheid.” Review of National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile, by Rachel Sandwell. Canadian Journal of African Studies (2026). Forthcoming, 2026.
2026 - Mazzeo, Vincenza, et al. A History of Education at the University Health Network: From Teaching Hospital to Academic Hospital and Canada’s Largest Academic Health Sciences Complex, 1900 – 2025. University of Toronto: UHN/Wilson Centre, 2026.
2023 - Mazzeo, Vincenza and Alexandre White. “Racism, Colonialism, and the Structure of Medical Knowledge in the Earliest Period of the Global COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign, 2020-2021,” in Medical Knowledge in the Global South, edited by Jonathan Janson and Jessica Auerbach. New York: Springer Publishing, December 2023.
Vincenza’s academic and community service includes membership on the Board of Advisors for the new Deyaanga Museum of Healing and Reconciliation (2025-2030), Board of Directors for Consent Culture Canada (2021-2023), Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future (2021), and the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine’s Prize Nomination Committee (2021). She is Co-founder of the International Conference for Rethinking African Media as Archives (2023), Gender and the Academy in Crisis (2021), and the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) Reading Group “On the Beauty of Feminist Rage” (2018). Vincenza has also participated in over 50 national and international conferences.
Beyond the academy, Vincenza engages in direct-action, community-based organizing against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) across five countries and is a member of Women Also Know History, Informed Opinions, and the Ontario Health Coalition. She is Italian-Canadian and currently resides on the unceded territory of various nations, including the Anishinaabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples, in Toronto, Canada.
Academic & Community Service
