Laura Beers, a professor of modern British history in AU’s History Department, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025, one of many prestigious awards that her work has garnered in recent years. The Guggenheim Fellowship, which is highly selective, is intended to provide accomplished mid-career professionals with the financial support and freedom to work on projects that are meaningful to them. This is certainly the case with Prof. Beers, who is using her time as a Guggenheim fellow to work on her next book on the politics of assisted reproduction and surrogacy since the birth of the world’s first in-vitro fertilization (IVF) baby in Oldham, Britain in July 1978. Prof. Beers has written about her own personal experience with IVF and is widely sought out in media circles as an expert commentator on public debates about assisted reproductive technology, abortion, and perceptions of womanhood.
The visibility of these issues and importance of Prof. Beers’ research on the history of public debates over IVF procedures has only grown in recent years. In 2023, it was estimated that twelve million children had been born via IVF worldwide, with nearly two percent of all live births in the United States the result of IVF and other artificial reproductive technologies. IVF is particularly common here in Washington, DC, where 1 in 15 babies born are conceived via IVF. Yet, as Beers notes, “policymakers have failed to come to terms with the ethical and social implications of assisted reproduction. The prominence of debates over IVF funding and the status of unborn embryos in recent years underscores the ongoing uncertainty about what role technologies like IVF, surrogacy, egg freezing and genetic testing should play in 21st century society.”
Prof. Beers’ Guggenheim Fellowship joins a long list of honors and recognitions that has been garnered by her groundbreaking work. Her latest book, Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (WW Norton), won the 45th Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and was also named as one of the New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2024.” It was inspired in part by Prof. Beers’ own experience in the classroom with AU undergraduate students in her course HIST 235: “The West in Crisis, 1900–1945,” where Orwell’s texts and ideas constituted a major portion of intellectual debate and discussion. Orwell’s Ghosts is Prof. Beers’ third book, which follows up on the success of Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Harvard University Press, 2016), which received the Stansky Award for best book published in field of modern British history.