Honouring Healers

Karen Flynn (PhD ’03), a women’s studies graduate from York University, has been inaugurated as the first Terrance & Karyn Holm Endowed Professor in Nursing at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The investiture ceremony, held last April, marked her transition from years in the humanities as a gender and women’s studies professor to the College of Nursing, a division rooted in health-care science. 

Since January, Flynn has actively promoted the Midwest Nursing History Research Center at UIC, where she now serves as director. Collaborating with UIC Nursing associate professor Gwyneth Franck on the Mapping Care project, Flynn aims to highlight the contributions of Black nurses in Chicago through a travelling exhibit and website.

Flynn’s interest in researching women in the labour force was sparked by observing female volunteers at her local church in Toronto, where she grew up. This led her to focus her PhD research not only on Caribbean nurses who migrated to Canada, but also on Black Canadian nurses born in Canada, reflecting her commitment to introducing inclusive narratives to her field.

“York provided me with the theoretical tools to think about work and to include Black Canadians in the project and not always centre on Caribbean people,” says Flynn, whose seminal 2011 work, Moving Beyond Borders, is the first book-length history of Black health-care workers in Canada. ■