Nancy D. Campbell is a professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The catalyst for her first book, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Reproduction (Routledge, 2000) was the claim that crack-cocaine-using pregnant women had lost their "maternal instincts." Her next book was a history of the science of addiction research from the 1920s to the present titled Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (University of Michigan Press, 2007). The book tells the story of human subjects research conducted by the US Public Health Service at the US Public Health Service Narcotic Hospital in Lexington, KY. An example of scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the book shows the interpenetration between research on licit pharmaceutical drugs and that on illicit opioids and other drugs. It narrates how addiction was redefined as a "chronic, relapsing brain disorder," and how it became the object of neuroscientific investigation.
Her third book was co-authored with independent film-makers JP Olsen and Luke Walden, who made a terrific documentary called "The Narcotic Farm" that may be viewed on vimeo. The book is a visual history of a legendary federal drug treatment facility outside of Lexington, KY. The book is titled The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America's First Prison for Drug Addicts (Harry N. Abrams, 2008). Together Campbell, Olsen, and Walden sometimes do a performance piece titled "A Night Out at the narcotic farm" that premiered at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York.
Her fourth book was co-authored with feminist sociologist Elizabeth Ettorre, and was titled Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World (Palgrave, 2011). Her fifth book is forthcoming from The MIT Press in February 2020 and will be titled OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose. She has also written on the history of harm reduction drug policy; sweat-patch drug testing; psychiatric epidemiology; and feminist science studies.
She has two children, Isaac and Grace, and lives in Troy, New York. She was born and raised in Berwick, Pennsylvania, save for a brief sojourn in Olney, a neighborhood in North Philadelphia, to which she owes her abiding interest in drugs. She went to Bucknell University, did a master's in the English department at the University of Washington (Seattle), and completed her doctorate in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She taught at The Ohio State University in the Department of Women's Studies before moving to the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer.
