The Disability History Association and the University of Illinois Press are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History Prize is Reynaldo Caasi Capucao Jr. for his currently titled project, “Pressed into Starched Whites: Nursing (Dis)ability in Filipino/American History”!

Capucao is the Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the History of Nursing and Healthcare at the University of Virginia School of Nursing. He is coauthor of Raising Standards, Saving Lives: The History of UP Nursing (University of the Philippines Press, 2023).

Pressed into Starched Whites explores the subjective and embodied experiences of Filipino nurses since the early twentieth century across the United States and the Philippines. It examines the ablement (the process of becoming human) and disablement (the process of dehumanizing) of these nurses to understand how their capacity for professionalism remains interlocked with limited access to human flourishing. Capucao further investigates the entwined logics of racism and ableism and the very real effects of structural oppression on these nurses’ bodies and minds. This history of racialized disablement intervenes against the present dominant narrative ascribing Filipino nurses with exemplary caring ability
and health. As subjects and agents of imperial capitalism, these nurses, regardless of their success in assimilating into the norm, remain bound to racializing discourses of disablement. In revising this dissertation into a monograph, Capucao will write an additional chapter which examines the early twentieth-century recruitment of Filipina nurses in the Territory of Hawai‘i and Cleveland, Ohio.

More information on the Outstanding Dissertation in Disability History Prize here.

More information on the Disability Histories series here.