In a special event co-sponsored by the UIowa Department of History, author Paul Renfro will read from and talk about one of the most significant public figures of the 1980’s AIDS Epidemic, The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America.  He will be joined in conversation by Associate Professor of History Mariola Espinosa.

“When it comes to media coverage of HIV, few Americans have garnered as many headlines as Ryan White. But there is a difference between the person and the cultural figure . . . . [Renfro] plumbs the depths of those contrasts [and] puts the late AIDS activist’s life into context.”—POZ Magazine

Paul Renfro is an associate professor of history at Florida State University. He earned his PhD in history from the University of Iowa, where he was a Louis Pelzer Dissertation Fellow. He is the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, and the coeditor of Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945.  His scholarly articles have appeared in Feminist Studies and Disability Studies Quarterly. Renfro regularly writes for popular outlets such as TIME, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, Dissent, Teen Vogue, and Jacobin, and he has been interviewed for stories in The Nation, the New Yorker, ELLE, Jezebel, The Appeal, Salon, and Mother Jones.

Mariola Espinosa is Associate Professor in the UIowa Department of History and affiliated faculty in the in the Program in Bioethics and Humanities at the Carver College of Medicine. Her specialization is in the history of medicine and public health in the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as in histories of empire and disease, race and medicine, and transnational medical practices. From 2017 to 2020 she served as the Director of the Global Health Studies Program. Espinosa is the author of Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930, published by University of Chicago Press.