Patricia D’Antonio, PhD, RN, FAAN, to Lead Penn Nursing’s Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing

“As a national and international expert in the history of nursing and nursing practice, Dr. D’Antonio is the ideal choice for this leadership role,” said Dean Antonia Villaruel, PhD, RN, FAAN. “Her research emphasizes how this history contributes to the current status of the discipline of nursing, health care, and developments in the humanities and sciences.”

D'Antonio is a nurse and historian whose body of scholarship situates the profession's work and worth in both American hospitals and health care agencies and in the fabric of families and communities. She is the editor of the Nursing History Review, the official journal of the American Association for the History of Nursing; a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics; a core faculty of Women's Studies; and a member of the Graduate Group in the History and Sociology of Science. D'Antonio also has a strong international presence and serves on numerous advisory and editorial boards including that of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery and Nursing Inquiry, among many others.

D'Antonio’s current research analyzes the critically important role nurses played in the early 20th century's experimental health demonstration projects that sought to increase health care access and equity to poor, working class, immigrant, and rural families. Her previous book, American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work, positions nurses as absolutely central to the larger interdisciplinary histories of institutions, clinical practice, health care policy, and women's care work. This book has been internationally recognized for its importance in creating a new intellectual paradigm for nursing's history: one that analyzes nurses as members of families and communities, as well as clinicians in hospitals and health care agencies.

D’Antonio replaces Julie Fairman, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Nightingale Professor of Nursing and chair of the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences, who is stepping down as head of the Center after nearly ten years of leadership.

About the University of Pennsylvania School of NursingThe University Of Pennsylvania School Of Nursing is one of the world’s leading schools of nursing and is ranked the #1 graduate nursing school in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. Penn Nursing is consistently among the nation’s top recipients of nursing research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Penn Nursing prepares nurse scientists and nurse leaders to meet the health needs of a global society through research, education, and practice.