Dr. Will Fenton speaks with Dr. Sarah Knott, Professor of History at Indiana University. Dr. Knott wears many hats. She’s been the editor of the American Historical Review, the author of Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009), as well as a Library Company fellow (1999). Dr. Knott is also a mother, a role to which she’s brought her skills as a trained historian. In a new book entitled Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History (2019), she entwines memoir and history in an extraordinary, transnational account of maternity that spans the seventeenth century and the late-twentieth century.

Fenton and Knott began their conversation by examining the first several pages of William Cadogan’s An Essay upon Nursing (London, 1757).