Mensa's World Gathering 2021

Serena Barbieri
MD, MA American History, Assistant Editor Journal of Southern History, Medical Future Lab Fellow, Digital Health Humanities Research Fellow
Rice University


For almost two decades, Serena, an arrhythmologist and interventional electrophysiologist, practiced medicine and worked as a scientific translator. She lived in Italy, Switzerland, and Spain with her family (two children and two cats) until five years ago, when she relocated to Texas to pursue a life and career change and a master’s degree in history. Pivoting around her passion for archival research, she found herself driven toward applying the quantitative method to historical inquiries, and, for her thesis, built a database of more than 5,000 Civil War soldiers who chose to desert their Connecticut regiments. Placing the data in the context of both the sociopolitical discourse of the era and the soldiers’ literary production allowed her to argue the deserters’ motivations, including their medical conditions. In 2020, she interned at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, developing a project aimed at identifying the 95 bodies of African American convicts discovered in unmarked graves in Sugar Land, Texas, in 2018. She has been involved in several other public history and digital humanities projects, publishing essays on Mexican labor history and lynching cases in Texas, producing a public exhibit on the history of segregation in Huntsville, Texas, and co-creating and editing a website for translating humanities work on the Covid-19 pandemic into advice for policymakers, medical staff, and researchers. She is currently working on a project that examines how ideas of masculinity explain the social and cultural evolution of the American South, the creation of an informal American empire, and the present-day controversies involving labor, race, and immigration.

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