Stephens to Give UW Faculty Senate Speaker Series Presentation March 11

Jennifer Stephens, a University of Wyoming School of Nursing assistant professor, is the spring semester Faculty Senate Speaker Series award recipient.

She will discuss “The Colorful History of Nursing in Wyoming” at 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 11, in the Wyoming Union East Yellowstone Ballroom. A reception will follow the presentation.

Stephens, who joined the UW Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing in August 2022, says the history of nursing in Wyoming is a history that includes women, men, children, medicine, hospitals, railroads, hog farms, prostitutes, soldiers, townspeople, country doctors, Native healers, Mexican curanderos, pioneers and ranchers.

“The need to heal and to be healed is a universal human condition, and the particularly rugged nature of Wyoming’s landscape necessitated creativity and collaboration,” she says.

Her lively history presentation speaks to the rise of the nurse in Wyoming, from informal and untrained caregivers to the formal Nightingale nurses who brought professional nursing to the state.

“The line is not a straight one, however, with overlapping interests and knowledge and competing visions of caring and medicine layered on each other in a way that created a colorful canvas of healing,” Stephens says. “A sociocultural historical perspective guides this work and allows for the exploration of social, cultural, intellectual and personal data in a way that is informative and, dare to say, interesting -- even for the nonmedical professional.”

Her primary sources guiding this expansive work include handwritten letters, photographs, artifacts, newspaper articles, journal entries and oral histories. Stephens’ presentation will cover Wyoming before the pioneers arrived and journey through the territorial period (1868-1890), early statehood (1890s to 1920s), and into the modern era with an emphasis on the end of diploma programs and the development of the formal Bachelor of Nursing degree at UW in 1951.

Stephens has a Ph.D. nursing from the University of British Columbia; an M.A. in history from Portland State University; a BSN from Washington State University; an ADN from Portland Community College; and a B.A. in history/anthropology from the University of Colorado.

UW’s Faculty Senate schedules a speaker for both the fall and spring semesters.

For more information about Stephens’ program, call the Faculty Senate office at (307) 766-5348.