About Lexi

Alexandra M. Lord received her BA from Vassar College and her PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  After winning the Shryock Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine, she was awarded the J. Elliot Royer Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.  An active scholar, she has been the recipient of various grants and awards throughout her career, including, most recently, a Fulbright Research Fellowship (2021). In 2010, the British Medical Association awarded her book, Condom Nation: A History of Federally Funded Sex Education from World War I to the Internet, its award for the best popular book on medicine.

Lexi is the daughter and descendant of multiple individuals who chose to end their own lives. In 2020, she returned to a research project she began decades ago, a study of the history of suicide. This new project, a book entitled Bridge: The Afterlife of Suicide in an American Family, 1890-2022, uses her family’s multi-generational story of suicide to explore an uncomfortable reality at the heart of American culture: suicide and the violence it does to families. Bridge debunks some of our most stubborn myths and misconceptions about suicide, including its frequency and meaning across time.

Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Baltimore Sun among other places.  She has been interviewed on The History Channel, C-SPAN, The PBS NewsHour, and in The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, on American history as well as graduate education reform. And she has been solicited to speak on public history, the history of medicine, and preservation at places such as Renmin University in Beijing, the National Library of Medicine, and Ellis Island.

Between 2016 and 2018, she was the President of the National Council on Public History, the nation’s largest public history organization. More recently, she served on the Board of Directors for the American Council of Learned Societies, a nonprofit federation of 78 scholarly organizations which uses its $140 million dollar endowment to advocate for the humanities. Currently, she serves on the Landmarks Committee of the National Park System Advisory Board, the committee tasked by the Secretary of the Interior through the National Park Service to review sites for designation as National Historic Landmarks. Since 2016, she has been the Chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.